A novella from one of the 19th century's bestselling novelists.
Abraham Leigh, a Somerset farmer, has long hoped that his son Gerald will take over Watercress Farm when he retires, but he knows deep down that the young man is not cut out for agricultural life. For Gerald is an artist, making sculptures from clay rather than ploughing the fields, and his future lies elsewhere.
Abraham turns to his landlord, Mr Herbert, a man of culture, for advice. Herbert visits the farm with his daughter Eugenia and sees in Gerald's amateur sculptures a natural talent. He agrees to help the boy get a place in art school. Gerald, meanwhile, is smitten with the girl, although his feelings are not reciprocated.
When Abraham dies seven years later, Gerald returns to Somerset to arrange his affairs. There he meets Eugenia again, now a young woman, and this time she returns his affections. The couple plan to marry, but the Herbert family intervene. Eugenia will be disinherited if she marries a common artist. She chooses family duty and money over love, and a heartbroken Gerald returns to London and immerses himself in his work.
But the lives of these two lovers are once again entwined when a sculpture of a young woman becomes the talk of The Academy. All of London are clamouring to see this exquisite work and to find out more about the artist. When Eugenia herself sees it, the consequences prove to be tragic.
For a brief period during the 1880s, Hugh Conway was one of the most popular authors in the world and counted Emily Dickinson among his fans. He died tragically young, of typhoid fever, at the age of just thirty-seven.
Part of the Very Short Classics series, a collection of short books from around the world, and across the centuries, many of which are being made available as ebooks for the very first time.
Please note that this is a print-on-demand edition of a short novella, so the finished book won't be quite the same as many of the others on your shelves - it won't have a title or author name on the spine, for example - but we wanted to make this story available in print as well as ebook and this is currently the best way to do so.
