The Grosvenor Romance: A Novel (Chapters I-VII)

Abstract

The story takes place in a coastal Massachusetts town, Grosvenor, in the autumn and winter of 1850. The protagonist is 18-year-old Margaret Browne, a young lady beginning to experience the first stirrings of a need for independence, one who has also begun working as an assistant teacher to her strict mother, the town’s only schoolteacher. When Margaret accepts another position as part-time assistant to Rev. Ephraim Norton at First Parish, her church, she soon becomes taken with the newly arrived Norton. He is charming, full of passion, and leans away from the orthodox and towards the fashionable transcendentalism of fellow New Englanders Emerson and Alcott, authors who have been intellectually exciting Margaret. When word comes to Margaret of another arrival in town, an unmarried woman by the name of Rebekah Perkins, one who immediately establishes a winning reputation for herself for her skills as a healer, Margaret is conflicted: she has it on the authority of local gossip Elizabeth Bradford that Perkins is a bad woman, one who may well do harm in Grosvenor; nevertheless, she is attracted to Perkins and, in time, begins what will turn out to be a teacher-student relationship with her. The truth is that Perkins is in the service of the devil, but the more Margaret tries to convince herself of the evil of what she finds herself involved with, the more difficult she finds it to free herself of Perkins.