Aterrorizada por el desolado destino de la soltería, Jane Charlmont, la menor de tres hermanas, se lanza sin el menor miramiento a un matrimonio por interés con un viejo y rico viudo, suegro por lo demás del hombre del que estuvo enamorada una de sus hermanas.

Five short pieces of fiction by the sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (better
known as a poet), first published in 1870. This edition has a brief
introduction by Andrew Motion, who points out that `Rossetti is more
interested in mood than event'.

The mood of this volume is sombre and melancholy indeed, its themes loss and death, problems of love and age, its concerns with piety and propriety.
Guilt and grief alike lead to failing health; there are nine deaths in these
112 pages. The three orphan sisters in the title-story illustrate the
`commonplace' dependent plight of 19th-century middle-class women `as they swirl down the marriage-stream towards the rapids of lonely old age', as
Motion puts it. `Pros and Cons', is a discussion of the moral issues
involved in the seclusion of closed church pews. Sarah in `The waves of this
troublesome world' admits to a `sin' that `had brought her father's grey
hairs down with sorrow to the grave' by falling `into grievous error when
she turned her back on the church of her baptism and followed ever so dear a
person into schism': that is, she married a Methodist.

A solemn illustration of deeply held Anglican principles of the period. Book
groups would hardly debate the same issues of virtue and error in discussing
this book, but might consider how the author's principles came to hold such
strong sway, how the fates of the three sisters -- and poor Sarah -- might
have been ameliorated, the general social issues of the period, and how
closely the themes relate to Rossetti's own somewhat obscure life.

There are some stylistic delights, such as:

`Behind her, and more deliberately, descended her husband, elastic of step,
rotund of figure, bright-eyed, rosy, white-headed, not altogether unlike a
robin redbreast that had been caught in the snow.'

Certainly an interesting work, of its own peculiar kind.