A gentleman travelling with a young companion breaks a carriage wheel near a Cornish estate and finds it governed by a group of women who have withdrawn from fashionable society. They run schools, almshouses and fair employment for the poor, and each tells the hard history of courtship, marriage and loss that brought her there.
A landmark eighteenth-century utopia of female friendship by the sister of the bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu. Download the free EPUB.