The Clever Woman of the Family: A Romance, Fiction and Literature Classic By Charlotte Mary Yonge! AAA+++

The time of the novel is approximately the 1860’s; the place, Avonmouth, a sea-side resort; the unlikely heroine, Rachel Curtis, pedant, frustrated social reformer, self-styled old maid. The plot charts the stages of her downfall from a position of confident intellectual superiority to humble acceptance of her limitations both as a thinker and as a philanthropist. The method used by Charlotte Yonge to reveal the absurdity and danger of her assumptions is dramatic, usually comic, irony.