The Clever Woman of the Family

Rachel Curtis is clever, means well, and is certain she knows how to improve the world; she takes up a charity, a lace school and an admirable philanthropist, and every single thing she does is a disaster. Yonge lived her whole life in one Hampshire village and taught Sunday school there for seventy-one years; this 1865 novel is her hardest, and its target — the intelligent woman with nothing to do and no training to do it — is treated with far more sympathy than the title suggests. Sixty plates of English and Irish scenes, among them Richard Redgrave's The Emigrant's Last Sight of Home and Walter Osborne's When the boats come in, picture the quiet domestic world Rachel Curtis means to set right.