Celibates

Three long stories about people who do not marry: Mildred Lawson, a rich girl who tries art and philanthropy and slips out of every engagement; John Norton, a young Catholic who wants the cloister more than any woman; and Agnes Lahens, a convent girl brought home to a worldly household who goes back to the nuns. Moore went to Paris to paint, failed, and came back with Zola's method; these 1895 studies were early enough in English fiction that the frankness about a woman's own desire had nowhere to be published quietly. Sixty plates by Hammershøi and Degas, among others, follow the same theme of solitary figures in quiet interiors, matching these stories of lives that refuse the ordinary bargain.