The New Magdalen

Two women are alone in a French farmhouse in the war of 1870 — a lady of good family and a woman out of a reformatory — and a shell falls. One survives, and takes the other's name and her place in a great English house. Collins wrote this in 1873, and the fashionable world was scandalised: the point of the book is that the reformed woman is better than the people who will not have her, and he says so in the plainest terms he ever used. Fifty-three plates of painting, from Edvard Munch to Édouard Manet, catch the passing world of the 1870s — terraces, canals, soldiers and farmhouses — the very scenes this story of borrowed lives moves through.