A Bit of Rough Road

Hope St. Clair comes back from a London season with her aunt, beautifully dressed and quietly unhappy, to her father's quiet house in a cathedral town. A new friend, who has given up slum work for bee-farming, shows her another way to live, and the dream of a cottage with a small poultry-farm becomes a matter of practical arithmetic. Amy Le Feuvre wrote for a public that expected a religious answer and gave it — but the small economies and country work of the second half are closely observed. Forty-nine plates by painters including Gainsborough and Millais trace the wooded landscapes, hop gardens and cottage doorways that frame this story of quiet English lives.