The Passions of Emma - Softcover

Williamson, Penn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0446605972 ISBN 13: 9780446605977

Publisher: Vision, 1998

Synopsis

Born to a life of wealth and privilege in turn-of-the-century Rhode Island, Emma Tremayne's life is all mapped out for her--including her engagement to the town's most eligible bachelor. Emma's sheltered world is shattered, however, when she discovers the horrifying working conditions in her fiance's textile mill. And when she encounters Shay McKenna, a brave Irish revolutionary, she learns what it will take to defy society's conventions, and experience a love she never thought possible.

About this title

Review

With skill and beauty, Penelope Williamson conveys the power and poignancy of many kinds of love in this moving story of an all-consuming, forbidden passion between a high-society beauty from late-19th-century Rhode Island and the impoverished Irish revolutionary who is married to her new friend. Emma Tremayne, bound by duty in a luxurious, highly restricted world, unconsciously yearns for something more. Gradually she reaches out to a poor Irish woman, a pregnant millworker with a husband and two children, who is dying of consumption. In Bria McKenna, Emma finds a soul-deep friend who quietly transforms her, opening her eyes to new joys and possibilities. Observing Bria's rock-solid love for her husband Shay, Emma begins to find within her own heart a previously unknown capacity for passion and devotion. Yet Emma dares not reveal to Bria that she's fallen in love with Shay. Williamson captures this time and place, and these complex relationships, in vividly realized, highly visual scenes, creating a memorable novel of real and enduring characters, with language whose elegiac tone captures the fleeting beauty of life. --Ellen Edwards

From Kirkus Reviews

A veteran romancer returns with her third hardcover (The Outsider, 1996, etc.), a flowery valentine to friendship and the love that crosses all boundaries. Williamson co-opts Edith Wharton territory in this story of a buttoned-up Edwardian American and the wild, marauding Irish boy of her dreams. In the mill town of Bristol, Rhode Island, at the turn of the century, Emma Tremayne (one of the ``wicked and outrageously rich Tremaynes'') lives in the lap of gentrified luxury in a well-ordered, confined society of ``rules and duties and reproaches, of must-do's and must-nots.'' Emma's father has deserted her cruel and slightly delusional mother and is now living with his ``doxies'' in Havana; her homosexual brother has committed suicide; and her sister is crippled for life and drugging herself with chloral hydrate. But no one talks about these things. Instead, everybody talks about the weather. Then into Emma's life, just as she's about to marry successful textile tycoon Geoffrey Alcott, comes mill worker Bria McKenna. Bria, dying of consumption and pregnant, and her brother Donagh, the parish priest, become the spiritual center of the story, representing the power of love. Though they come from vastly different social classes, Emma and Bria not only become best friends, but Emma unwillingly falls in love with the young woman's husband Shay. Meanwhile, not long for this world, Bria hatches a scheme to bring together all the people she most loves: her friend Emma, her husband, and her three wee babes. It's only after her death that Shay and Emma give in to their powerful attraction. But can people from such dramatically different worlds really find love and sail into the sunset (on Emma's trim little boat)? In one Grand Guignol sequence, Emma's family sends her to a 19th-century asylum to cure her of her irrational passion. But not even straitjackets can alter the course to a happy end. A clich‚, yes, but an extremely satisfying one. (Literary Guild alternate selection) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vision
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0446605972
• ISBN 13: 9780446605977
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 464