The Heart of Arethusa
Arethusa Worthington is eighteen, coppery-haired, and full of romantic notions that sit oddly against the ordered Kentucky farmhouse where she has grown up. Her three elderly great-aunts have raised her: the exacting Miss Eliza, the gentler Miss Letitia, and the invalid Miss Asenath, who has kept to her bed for fifty years. Then the father Arethusa has barely known writes from Italy to say he has married again, to a woman named Elinor, and her small settled world begins to open toward a wider one she has only imagined. Frances Barton Fox writes with plain affection for country manners and for a girl measuring the distance between daydream and daily life. Readers who like unhurried domestic novels of early twentieth-century America, where character matters more than plot, will settle into this one easily.
