Dora Thorne

A lodge-keeper's daughter marries a lord's son in secret, and his family's discovery of it takes twenty years to finish what it starts. Brame wrote some two hundred romances of wronged wives and secret marriages, adored by servant girls and duchesses alike; American publishers reprinted her without payment under the name Bertha M. Clay, which they went on using for decades after she was dead. Fifty-eight plates after painters from Millet to Arthur Hughes, ranging from women at their spinning and wood-gathering to the quiet of rest and remembrance, echo the novel's patient reckoning with a woman's lot.