"A masterpiece." - Walter Allen. A moral fable about the narrow and starved existence that results from self-sacrifice, this novel traces a Victorian woman's suffocating and stunted life. More than a case history of an underdeveloped individual who chooses loyalty to a friendship over the lure of romance, the story criticizes the values of 19th-century middle-class society and the irresponsibility and destructiveness that lurk beneath the façade of good manners.
