Courtship in Purgatory: A Novel [Paperback]

Set in the conservative French-speaking community of Sagamore Falls, a fictional New Hampshire mill town, Courtship in Purgatory portrays parental control over middle-aged offspring in an upper-middle-class family. When protagonist Victoria discovers a disturbing entry in her deceased fathers journal, she relives a painful episode dating back a quarter-century, from which she had healed. At 33, Victoria lived a sheltered existence with her parents. Although she adored them, especially her fathershe worshipped the water he walked onshe hoped to marry Lucien, whose working-class status did not measure up to her parents standards. Consequently, her father separated the lovers via a secret plot that threatened to smear Luciens image in Victorias eyes. Caught between the two men she loved, she wondered: Should she follow her conscience by obeying her father? Or should she follow her heart without knowing if Lucien was the morally upstanding man he appeared to be?Set in the conservative French-speaking community of Sagamore Falls, a fictional New Hampshire mill town, Courtship in Purgatory portrays parental control over middle-aged offspring in an upper-middle-class family.Historian Robert B. Perreaults novel Courtship in Purgatory is an intimate look at the difficulties faced by two middle-aged loversVictoria and Lucienin the Canadian-Franco-American enclave in Sagamore Falls, New Hampshire in the years after WWII. The characters are not laborers in the dreadful sweatshops of the textile mills, but middle-class people in the world of journalism. The story is both complicated and resolved by the central characterVictorias father, an inflexible traditionalist Republican Horatio-Alger businessman for whom social status, income, standing in the community and command over his children are important. His regard for his 33-year-old daughter as my little girl, his insistence on control and his abrupt change of attitude replicate the huge problem of this and everylÃ+