Opening a Chestnut Burr

A New York man of fashion, bored and ill, goes to his family's old place in the Hudson Highlands, now owned by his father's friend Walton, and finds there a daughter of the house who manages everyone and does not need rescuing. Roe was a Presbyterian minister and a Civil War chaplain who turned novelist after the Chicago fire and outsold every American of his decade; the burr of the title is what has to be opened, and it is not hers. Sixty paintings of the Hudson Highlands and the Housatonic Valley, among them landscapes by Jasper Francis Cropsey and George Inness, follow the novel's country-house world from 1845 to 1908.