Confession

Folly, William Gilmore Simms warns, can make the heart both jailer and prisoner. Edward learns this early: orphaned as an infant, he enters a home where he feels less like kin than a burden.

In the closed world of a respectable family, appearances of charity and virtue sit uneasily beside private cruelties. Edward is sent to an ordinary school in threadbare clothes, while his cousin Edgar is dressed in finery and shielded from every roughness of boyhood. The contrast teaches Edward to expect scorn—and to meet it with defiance. Yet the story’s danger lies not only in the unfairness he suffers, but in the suspicions and passions that take root within him. Can Edward learn to see the people around him clearly before his own heart turns against him?

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