To Love

Joan Rutherford is twenty-three and restless when she leaves her quiet country home for a life of her own in London. Drawn to the modern belief that love need not wait on marriage, she moves in with the charming, self-absorbed Gilbert Stanning, only to learn how fast his devotion turns to embarrassment once his family appears. Margaret Peterson follows what comes next with unusual frankness for 1917: Joan’s return home, an unexpected pregnancy, and the cold judgment of the aunt and uncle who raised her. The book weighs a young woman’s longing for independence against the era’s rigid rules for respectable women, and asks what love is really worth once passion and reputation collide. Peterson takes her heroine’s inner life seriously from the first page to the last.