Brought Home

A woman drinks, and her household — husband, servants, the parish — arranges itself around the fact, concealing it, until it cannot be concealed. Stretton was Sarah Smith of Shropshire, who took her pen name from her sisters' initials and a village on the map; Jessica's First Prayer outsold Alice in Wonderland in its day. This short novel is her hardest, and there is no easy rescue in it. Fifty-seven plates, among them Augustus Egg's Past and Present and Luke Fildes's The Travelling Companions, gather the moralising domestic painting of 1725 to 1914 that gives this tale of a hidden habit its visual argument.