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About Phoebe Deane (Unabridged)

This book has all the makings of a fairy tale. The lovely orphaned girl, Phoebe Deane, lives with her kind but ineffectual half-brother but is treated like an unpaid servant by his shrewish wife. A crude widower with a houseful of children is determined to have her. He repulses her but her sister-in-law helps with the scheme to get her in his clutches. Phoebe is in despair and would prefer death to living with a tyrant. Along comes a fairy godmother (the wily Miranda Griscom from Livingston Hill's Marcia Schuyler and Miranda ) full of sympathy and plans to help her. And the handsome stranger Phoebe meets in the woods one day might be a key to her salvation. But the book's most serious theme, as in many of GLH's stories, is gossip: the perniciousness of it, the ease with which it is spread, and the irreparable damage it can do to innocent lives. Worrying about "what the neighbors will think" was a real threat in small-town America in the early 20th century, which we tend to think of as a simpler time. But the spreading of gossip and ruining of reputations in a small community was as lethal then as social media can be today.