Life and Death of Harriett Frean

Harriett is the Victorian embodiment of all the virtues then viewed as essential to the womanly ideal: a woman reared to love, honour and obey. Idolising her parents, she learns from childhood to equate love with self-sacrifice, so that when she falls in love with the fiance of her closest friend, there is only one way to confront such an unworthy passion. Or so it seems... Ironic, brief and intensely realised, The Life and Death of Harriett Frean is a brilliant study of female virtue seen as vice, and stands with the work of Virgina Woolf and Dorothy Richardson as one of the great innovative novels of the century.