What a Woman Must Do - Softcover

When the novel opens, Bess is almost grown, and Kate is intent on getting her out of town to a teachers' college in St. Cloud before she "goes bad," certain that her charge will never live down the family scandal and will instead feel compelled to live up to it. "In a little place like Harvester," as even Bess realizes, "the past never became history, but sat side by side with current events, like an old woman pushing in among the young ones, insisting on being part of things." Although Kate feels ready to say good-bye to her Bess, a second parting is threatened. Unexpectedly, her friend Harriet has become involved with a widowed farmer named Devore Weiss. While Kate anticipates a lonely future, she is able to feel happy for Harriet. But Bess, at just 17, views Harriet's new attachment as an abandonment, and shuts off her love for Harriet like the flow from a faucet.

In this story of the past's influence on the present, Faith Sullivan returns to the setting and the moral climate of her previous novels The Cape Ann and The Empress of One. The quiet rewards of the Harvester series are not immediate in the first half of What a Woman Must Do, but as the novel unfolds, readers who persist will come to understand Kate, Bess, and Harriet not as conventional country women--stock characters in American prairie fiction--but as individuals, shaped, as we all are, by memory and longing. --Regina Marler