In the Library
A New England Nun and Other Stories
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, 1891
- Form
- Form Collection
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 9.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 24
- Length
- Length 133k words
£1.99
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The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Louisa sat, prayerfully numbering her days, like an uncloistered nun.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
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- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
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About the book
By the time Joe Dagget leaves, he has knocked over the work basket and set the autograph album on top of the gift book. Louisa Ellis gathers the spools, puts the books back in order, and sweeps up the dust his boots brought in. For fourteen years, while he was in Australia earning the fortune that would let them marry, this house has been hers alone, and she has kept it like a rule: the best china used daily, essences of rose and peppermint distilled in her still, the old dog chained in the yard where he has always been. Freeman understood what her century would not say aloud, that a woman can be handed everything she was promised and quietly want none of it. The stories around it hold the same small insurgents, the choir singer voted out after forty years who sings against her replacement from her own window, the farmer's wife who stops asking and moves her family into the new barn. Nobody else has made a life this narrow look so much like a vocation.