A World Too Wide

The Byford family was introduced in Paths of Fortune , which followed the growing up of Kate and Sophy, and their feckless younger brother, in rural Regency England. Now it is 1812; Kate has married a wealthy American and lives in Virginia; Sophy, wife of James Fraser, a neophyte inventor working on the prototype of the steamship, leaves her young son in England to join her husband in New York. The Napoleonic war results in the blockade of the port of New York, putting Sophy in financial and physical peril. Meanwhile, Charity Michaelmas, a former servant now rising in the demimonde as a wealthy prostitute, seeks to protect her daughter, the unacknowledged offspring of the Byfords' brother. The many strands in this carefully told, at times slow-paced story create a vivid pattern unified in the final chapters, when a predictable romance comes to fruition for the next generation. (Nov.)