Watercolors

This lush, richly-detailed Edwardian romance is Isobel Donaldson's debut novel. When Violet Smithson arrives at a Boston mansion in 1905 to fit party dresses for a Boston aristocrat’s daughters, a tall young man in a hurry nearly knocks over the widowed young dress designer. She learns he is artist Ned Alden. When they meet again at a concert at society matron Isabella Stewart Gardner’s beautiful Fenway Court the next evening, he tells her that he soon will travel to England to spend the summer with friends.

Mrs. Gardner arranges a matchmaking holiday for the unsuspecting Violet, arranging to send her across the Atlantic on the same steamship as Ned. After the voyage, the two part again. But when Ned unexpectedly reappears at Violet’s holiday home, will they finally be together in the the happiest summer of their young lives? Or will a woman from Ned’s past ruin everything?