Mercy Philbrick's Choice

"Mercy Philbrick's Choice" by Helen Hunt Jackson is a tale that takes inspiration from a school friend of Jackson's, the famed Emily Dickinson. When a New England man who is passionate about beauty and his argumentative mother have a mortgage on a house to pay, they live in one half in the hopes of renting the other. An 18-year-old widow who is honest to a fault and her childlike old mother come from the seaside to rent it.