The Imagination of the Heart

Catherine Marsh is a foundling raised in a charity ward, ``a blank canvas in a beautiful frame,'' when she catches the eye of prominent merchant banker Oliver van der Kleve, a widower. Before he marries her, however, Oliver oversees her preparation for the role of mistress of his Tunbridge Wells mansion, and stepmother to his spoiled adolescent daughter. Catherine is totally unprepared for the sexually obsessive and acquisitive dimension of this calculated union, but Victorian mores provide her with no alternatives. Although she does experience an awakening and brief enchantment with an artist hired by her husband to record her beauty, Catherine also has her eyes opened to the advantages of her marriage, especially after the advent of children. Glover ( The Stallion Man ) evokes the claustrophobic ambience of distaff life at the beginning of the century, when the double standard was a given. BOMC selection. (Feb.)