A fearful joy

This ambitious novel, covering the life of an exceptional woman from her Victorian childhood until after the Second World War, is an attempt, in the author's own words, 'to lay bare historical change not just at the surface, but in its roots.' Seduced when young, Tabitha leads a terrible existence until she is taken up by Sturge, a wealthy patron of art, and becomes a famous hostess of the 'Yellow Book' period, loved by artists and writers alike. Her second marriage to Sir James Gollan, an old industrialist, who instead of retiring becomes an important national figure in the First World War, completely changes her life once again. The novel, in fact, is full of change, for every decade emerges in an immediate and living manner as the setting against which the absorbing lives of the heroine and those about her are described.