Guy Morville inherits Redclyffe and a family curse of ungovernable temper, and spends the book trying to be good in the face of a cousin who is quietly determined to think the worst of him. Yonge lived her whole life in one Hampshire village and taught Sunday school there for seventy-one years; this 1853 novel made her famous, was passed round the Pre-Raphaelites, went to the Crimea in officers' kit, and reduced the young William Morris to tears. Fifty-one plates, from Millet's shepherdesses to Guardi's waterside scenes, echo the novel's quiet English landscapes and its long pull between home and the sea.
