A brilliant, unpublished writer of twenty-six, rejected yet again for the open way he states his opinions, tells the story of a love he kept putting off until tomorrow — for ambition, for principle, for a year of purity he believed they could both bear — and of what tomorrow turned out to hold. Victoria Cross was Annie Sophie Cory, born in India to an army family and determined to write what respectable women were not supposed to know; the reviewers called her indecent, which was the point. Fifty-nine plates, from Leighton and Waterhouse among others, trace the same Victorian tension between desire and duty that drives the novel, its paintings of oracle and destiny echoing a story forever deferred.
