A True Friend

Janetta is the music governess at a girls' school — a brown little thing of no particular importance — and Margaret Adair is its beauty and heiress, and the principal calls their friendship unsuitable from the first chapter. Adeline Sergeant follows it out into the world, through Margaret's family, Janetta's own home and a lie with long consequences, to the question of which of the two proves the true friend of the title. Sergeant wrote some ninety books and moved through three faiths while doing it — Methodist, Anglican, Catholic — and the moral seriousness of the search is all over her fiction. Fifty-eight plates from Herkomer and Reid and their contemporaries carry the book's own theme of character and conscience, portraits and lives that sit beside Sergeant's story of loyalty tested.