Ideala

At a garden party, Ideala is so absorbed in the clouds that she forgets the person beside her—then breaks into song, startled by her own silence. What makes this absent, enigmatic woman so hard to forget?

In late-Victorian society, where women are expected to fit their allotted parts, the narrator first encounters Ideala beside a garden river, gazing skyward while polite company gathers around her. Called cold by those who barely know her, she despises complacency, yet feels so deeply for others that sympathy can leave her speechless. As a young married woman, she longs for a life guided by more than convention—and her convictions make her both difficult to understand and impossible to dismiss. The narrator senses that her life has its own shifting music, with a melody not yet fully heard. What will it take for Ideala to find her tune?

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