The Seasons Hereafter Author:Elisabeth Ogilvie "On the southeast shores the deep swells rolled in one after another out of the fog and an invisible bell buoy clanged. The wind was we...But away from the sea, the fog was irradiated by the sun, the grass was dry; it was very green now, with the flat blades of blue grass beginning to show...and there were strawberry blossoms in the lee of old s... more »tone walls and boulders."
This was Vanessa's clearing--a small, secret place she had made her own since her arrival on Bennett's Island. It had not been easy to come here. Vanessa hated change--she had had her fill of it as a state's ward, shunted from one foster home to another, and she had married too young just to have permanence in her life. But her husband Barry wanted more than he could get on the mainland, and so when the legendary Bennetts of Bennett's Island offered him a job he grabbed it.
Venessa did not have a choice, and followed Barry--although the very thought of the Island, and of the brothers who owned everything on it, of their busybody wives, and slavish fishermen revolted her. THE DAY--the great moment of happiness and liberation of which Venessa had always dreamed--seemed more remot than ever. Life seemed to be over.
Then one evening she found a man standing in her kitchen--a strange, dark man with a smouldering look of a caged tiger. He recognized Vanessa as she recognized him; she forgot that he was one of the autocratic Bennetts and he knew that she was not just another lobsterman's wife.
Elisabeth Ogilvie, who has made Maine her own country, through many magnificent and deeply stirring novels set on its splendid coast, tells the story of Vanessa's and Owen Bennett's love. It is a haunting tale, accented by accidents of nature--storms, and almost miraculous runs of fish--that seem like omens. And the conclusion of Vanessa's DAY will remain in the reader's mind forever--to be evoked whenever a gull cries overhead, or an angry waves come crashing home to shore.« less