The Laurel Bush

An Old-Fashioned Love Story

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Pages: 89

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About this book

A rough letter box lodged in a crooked garden bush stands near the place where Fortune Williams waits for a fellow teacher. She is a governess to Mrs. Dalziel's unruly grandsons; Robert Roy comes from St. Andrews to tutor the older boys. Their shared lessons and walks bring two reserved, hardworking people into close companionship. In The Laurel Bush, Dinah Maria Mulock Craik traces the feelings beneath their formal manners and the limited consideration their employer gives them.

The story pays attention to wages, self-command, and small gestures of care. A later passage follows Fortune as she struggles to compose a letter to Robert in Shanghai, weighing old affection against the changes that years may have brought. Readers drawn to quiet love stories will find a novel concerned with memory and emotional restraint, where waiting at a gate or addressing an envelope can carry considerable weight.

About the author

Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

Dinah Maria Mulock Craik became a prominent Victorian novelist through fiction attentive to family duty, women’s work, disability, and moral independence. Olive: A Novel appeared in 1850 within her long, varied prose career and follows a young artist whose physical difference shapes how relatives and society regard her.