With the death of Rose, painful memories are awakened for her younger sister Ella, forcing her to confront the tragic consequences of their family's guilt, its penchant for martyrdom and denial of romantic love. As Ella guides her niece through love, the past begins to repeat itself. This story of the daughters of an upper class Victorian family at the beginning of the twentieth century, stands as an important examination of the changing attitudes of women to sex and romantic love.
Joyce Cary was born in 1888 into an old Anglo-Irish family and educated at Clifton. He studied art, first in Edinburgh and then in Paris , before going up to Trinity College, Oxford, in 1909 to read law. On coming down he served as a Red Cross orderly in the Balkan War of 1912-13,the inspiration for Memoir of the Bobotes , before joining the Nigerian Political Service. He served in the Nigeria Regiment during the First World War, was wounded while fighting in the Cameroons, and returned to civil duty in Nigeria in 1917 as a district officer. His time in Africa provided the inspiration for h...
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