Work: A Story of Experience

"Aunt Betsey, there's going to be a new Declaration of Independence." Christie Devon is twenty-one when she says it, and she means it, walking off the farm that raised her to find out what a woman can earn on her own. What follows is less a career than a scramble: servant, actress, governess, companion, seamstress, each place teaching her something, none of them keeping her, until the work runs out and she goes down to the river one night not meaning to come back.