Complete and unabridged, with 59 full-page plates by Thomas Cole, John Lavery and John Constable. Herminia Barton, Girton-educated and entirely serious, loves a man and refuses to marry him — marriage being a contract of ownership — and bears his child on principle. Allen wrote popular Darwinism for a living and detonated this in 1895; it was the scandal of the year, everyone from Punch to the pulpit attacked it, and what is shocking now is not her decision but the bill her daughter presents her with. Fifty-nine plates, from Munch's The Scream to Lavery's royal and naval scenes, chart the anxious modern world into which Allen's heroine dared to bring a child.
