Ernest Linwood

A schoolroom humiliation gives Gabriella Lynn the starting point for the story of her life. At twelve, she brings a poem before her classmates, only to hear her teacher, Mr. Regulus, ridicule her work. Looking back, she weighs his generosity as an instructor against the hurt he caused her as an aspiring writer. Caroline Lee Hentz's first-person novel makes this tension between imaginative ambition and practical expectations a deeply personal concern.

A later scene places Gabriella and Ernest in a moonlit grotto, surrounded by fountains and statues from classical mythology. Their conversation turns from the beauty of the figures to competing ideas about loyalty, betrayal, and the character of women and men. Lyrical descriptions and reflective dialogue give the book its emotional texture. It offers readers a nineteenth-century American novel in which literary aspiration, affection, and judgments about others meet within one woman's account of her experience.