Early Autumn

Description

Early Autumn is a 1926 novel by Louis Bromfield that won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1927. Early Autumn was the third installment in a series of four novels called Escape. Sabine Callendar had fled from the stifling propriety of Durham, New England twenty years ago. With a failed marriage behind her and an eighteen year old daughter to present to society, everyone is surprised to find that Sabine has returned, not as the pitiable and broken creature they expected, but as a strong and assured individual with an uncanny ability to see through the postures and pretenses of the society that oppressed her as a girl. With her bold independence and forthright nature, Sabine challenges the social order and becomes a catalyst for changes in the lives of the people around her.

Description

"<p>The Pentlands are a very conservative, old money family in a small town near Boston, who claim ancestry going back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In the fall of an unspecified year in the 1920’s, their world is invaded by several “outsiders,” including Sybil, the patriarch’s granddaughter back from a Paris education, Sabine, a prodigal niece who has returned after being gone for twenty years, together with her daughter Thérèse, and O’Hare, an Irish Catholic politician who is at odds with the deeply ingrained Protestant background of the community.</p> <p>As the novel progresses, it becomes increasingly clear to Olivia, Sybil’s mother, that all is not well in the Pentlands’ world; beneath the apparent calm there are secrets bubbling to the surface that have been hidden for years. It also becomes clear that with the changes taking place in the world at large and in their world in particular, the future of the Pentland family could be in peril.</p> <p>Before <a href=\"https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/louis-bromfield\">Louis Bromfield</a> became a well-known agriculturist, he was a writer of several successful novels. This family study, which is said to be based on his wife’s Puritan upbringing, won him a <a href=\"https://standardebooks.org/collections/pulitzer-prize-for-fiction-winners\">Pulitzer</a>.</p>"

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