The Rector's Daughter (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Susan Hill (Introduction), F.M. Mayor (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2001

  $113.14

  Mary was plain, middle-aged and reliable. Her life centred on her father, the crabbed and difficult Canon Jocelyn, and on the quiet duties of a rector's daughter deep in the country. She never dreamed that her life was to be shaken to the core by an unlooked-for love affair. The Rector's Daughter is a masterpiece...it is about love; filial love and married love and extreme sexual passion, and about the anguish, despair and intermittent bliss of every hopeless relationship between man and woman. It is a blisteringly honest account of middle-aged desire, that most painful of all afflictions, and at the same time a careful, tender study of a happy marriage Susan Hill

• Used

  Paperback
  1973

  $3.27

• New

  Paperback
  1987

  $11.60

  Dedmayne Rectory is quietly decaying, its striped chintz and darkened rooms are a bastion of outmoded Victorian values. Here Mary has spent thirty-five years, devoting herself to her sister, now dead, and to her father, Canon Jocelyn. Although she is pitied by her neighbours for this muted existence, Mary is content. But when she meets Robert Herbert, Mary's ease is destroyed and years of suppressed emotion surface through her desire for him. First published in 1924 this novel is an impressive exploration of Mary's relationship with her father, of her need for Robert and the way in which, through each, she comes to a clearer understanding of love.