The Tree of Knowledge

A girl brought up in a Devon combe by a father who has told her nothing about her mother learns the truth at the worst possible moment, and has to decide what she owes a name. G. M. Robins wrote as Baillie Reynolds and turned out popular novels for thirty years with an unusually cold eye for what a secret does to a household. The knowledge of the title arrives as a blow and stays as a debt. Fifty-four plates of Victorian and Edwardian portraits, including work by Roger Fry and John Collier, fix the novel's private reckoning in the public faces of its age.