Early Autumn

Set in an old, wealthy New England family whose fortunes and vitality are slowly draining away, this novel follows Olivia Pentland, a woman who married into the Pentlands and now feels the whole weight of their pride and buried secrets pressing down on her. Bromfield uses the household near Boston as a portrait of a class that has mistaken rigidity for strength, its Puritan past curdled into empty ceremony. Against that airless world, Olivia’s late awakening to her own desires and choices carries a real, quiet force. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1927 and stands with the best of Bromfield’s early fiction about American character and the price of respectability. Free to download as a PDF and EPUB.