Word: tabitha
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...follows one woman, Tabitha Baskett, whose life and strange love weaves through the Victorian Era, the Kaiser War, the depression, and still another war. Her life is a story of changing manners and morals. It starts as a life of revolt, against the humid prudery of a rural town, against the respectability of Victorian London; it ends in resistance to the new fangled ideas of younger revolutionists...
...Tabitha is raised the plain daughter of a plain doctor in a plain town. With an ingratiating knack for saying the right thing or nothing at all, she quickly rises to become the mistress of a wealthy Londoner, and the social chairwoman of a group of anti-Victorian artists. When her man dies, Tabitha gracefully marries an manufacturer, and finds herself running a near-Victorian household. From there she moves on to inn-keeping, and finally to dependence on her grandchildren...
...love is a steady thread through this tapestry of change. It is for a confidence man, named Bonser, a loud and promiscuous swindler with a flair for spending money, a blackguard whose interest in Tabitha lies squarely in her pocketbook. He seduces Tabitha and fails to marry her, yet he appears again and again through her marriage and divorce to bounce her on his knee and ask for a pound or two. She gives him the money and more than that, for Bonser is Tabitha's personal revolt, and her only consistent pleasure...
...fine disregard for the conventional flow of time. He can dismiss a war or a death with a sentence or two yet spend pages on a picture of Tabitha disciplining her child. This makes for a breathless narrative, intentionally short on description and drama. But although "A Fearful Joy" rolls this narrative past its readers in a headlong rush, it stops frequently to breathe, to question, and to laugh...
...support Bonser's baby, Tabitha becomes the mistress of an art-mad millionaire. Soon Tabitha is reigning as queen of the millionaire's crazy bohemian circle, passing esthetic judgments with unworried ignorance and editing a highbrow magazine...