The Passions of Emma

With skill and beauty, Penelope Williamson conveys the power and poignancy of many kinds of love in this moving story of an all-consuming, forbidden passion between a high-society beauty from late-19th-century Rhode Island and the impoverished Irish revolutionary who is married to her new friend. Emma Tremayne, bound by duty in a luxurious, highly restricted world, unconsciously yearns for something more. Gradually she reaches out to a poor Irish woman, a pregnant millworker with a husband and two children, who is dying of consumption. In Bria McKenna, Emma finds a soul-deep friend who quietly transforms her, opening her eyes to new joys and possibilities. Observing Bria's rock-solid love for her husband Shay, Emma begins to find within her own heart a previously unknown capacity for passion and devotion. Yet Emma dares not reveal to Bria that she's fallen in love with Shay. Williamson captures this time and place, and these complex relationships, in vividly realized, highly visual scenes, creating a memorable novel of real and enduring characters, with language whose elegiac tone captures the fleeting beauty of life. --Ellen Edwards