Bertha is enormous, inarticulate and of uncertain Baltic stock, and the families who hire her as a servant barely see her. Fannie Hurst follows her through kitchens high and low across New York, through a seduction, a child she cannot keep and years of hard labour, finding a deep, wordless goodness under the drudgery.
One of Hurst’s strongest novels, a compassionate portrait of the invisible working woman. Download the free EPUB.