Old Rose and Silver

A house of women — an aunt, two cousins, a rose-colored past and a silver-haired present — and a man who comes back from the war. Reed wrote Lavender and Old Lace and a dozen more that sold in the hundreds of thousands, plus cookery books under a pen name; she killed herself at thirty-six. The gentleness is real, and so is the shadow under it. Fifty-nine plates of quiet rooms, gardens and calm water by painters including Childe Hassam and Edvard Munch, spanning 1850 to 1922, echo the book's hush and its shadow.