The Gray Angels

A ragged, barefoot girl drives into Birge's Corners on a ramshackle wagon and offers to sing for her supper; the village recluse, Miss Abby Clergy, who has hidden herself away since a love affair of 1867, hears her and carries her off to New York to study for grand opera. Nalbro Bartley follows Thurley from the village into the studios and drawing rooms of the city, and finds a name for the people she admires: the gray angels, idealists with enough of the sinner in them to get things done. Bartley was widely serialised in the magazines of the 1910s and 1920s and wrote women who work for a living. Fifty-nine plates, from Sorolla to Bellows, trace the working women, quiet interiors and grey Atlantic weather that surround Thurley's passage from village wagon to opera stage.