Life and Death of Harriet Frean

This brief novel, called a perfect gem of a book" by contemporary British author Jonathan Coe, tells the life story of a Victorian woman named Harriett Frean. The story quickly breezes through the main character's infancy to her young adulthood, in which she denies her love of a man in deference to a friendship, to her spinsterhood, illness, old age, and death. In the telling, much is revealed about the role of women in the Victorian age--either as wife or caretaker of one's parents. This is a novel that presents a portrait of a woman held back by the restrictions of her time, yet just on the verge of all the freedoms that would emerge in the 20th century politically, socially and sexually"--