Word: nora
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IMPUNITY JANE, by Rumer Godden (Viking; $2.50), boasts one of the smallest heroines in recent fiction: a four-inch china doll. Impunity, like Ibsen's Nora, rebels against the doll's house, so Author Godden (The River, Black Narcissus) treats her to a high old time as the mascot of a bunch of boys who send her aloft with a toy balloon, spin her on a Catherine wheel and race her across a pond in a toy yacht...
...Nora Byrne is a girl with a past. Her mother and sister have died of TB. One young man has already jilted her over her "weak stock." Fearful of rousing the peasant horror of TB in the small Irish town to which she has come as a teacher, Nora resolves to tell no one her secret...
...aging ladies with whom she rooms are a sweet-and-sour pair of spinster sisters. The sour one treats embroidery as the first law of life, but the sweet one clucks over Nora like a mother and puts in a word now and then about Peter Lynch, the headmaster at Nora's school, and what a nice husband he would make...
Before long Peter is putting in a good word for himself. At 40, he lives with a devoted spinster sister, who intends to hang onto her bachelor brother for dear life, and for life. Tired of fencing with her own love, Nora tells Peter about the TB jinx, and he waves it aside to propose...
...jealous sister now has the secret weapon she wants. Before the next day is out. the first mother pounds on the schoolhouse door sputtering about "galloping consumption." Sick at heart, Nora takes to her bed half-convinced that the family curse has indeed caught up with her. And now the kindly village priest appears, trying to get Nora back on her feet...