SO WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT?

In 1882 Marian Brook, the orphaned, penniless daughter of a general who fought on the Union side in the American Civil War, moves into the home of her two aunts on

New York’s Upper West Side. Agnes is a haughty, widowed aristocrat who clings to old values and married a rich husband just as her parents’ money was running out, Ada has remained a spinster who relies on her sister for charity.

Marian has travelled to New York with Peggy Scott, a young African-American with hopes of becoming a writer, and the pair become friends. But Marian finds herself caught up in a social war between her aunts and their wealthy neighbours George and

Bertha Russell. He’s a railroad tycoon, and his wife’s hellbent on entering aristocratic society.

Marian finds herself mixing with an assortment of characters. There’s the Russells’ daughter Gladys, whose independence is no match for her mother’s forcefulness, and her brother Larry, a Harvard graduate. Then there’s Oscar, Agnes’s son, who’s on the lookout for an heiress, and Tom Raikes, a lawyer from Pennsylvania who represented Marian’s late father and followed her to New York.