An old adventurer's daughter, raised in the Austrian mountains, marries the most fashionable rake in England, and then declines to be ruined by him. Meredith's last completed novel turns the standard seduction plot inside out and hands the strength to the wife; the style is famously difficult, which is why other novelists admired him more than the public did. Sixty plates of eighteenth-century painting by Gainsborough and Romney follow the novel's mountain valleys, wooded landscapes and cattle ferries, matching its Austrian and English settings in paint.
