The Manuscripts: Of the Duke of Roxburghe, Sir H. H. Campbell, the Earl of Strathmore, and the Countess Dowager of Seafield (1894)

Her father, an outwardly steely, status-conscious businessman, has built a house in the country. As a young girl, Julia is thrilled to move from the cramped confines of Brooklyn to the freedom of pastural Connecticut. However, that freedom is not without cost. Rural life frays the already fragile weave of the Childress family. Metaphorically inebriated by his success, Eric Childress staggers through a series of mistresses and bouts of corporate American greed. At home his wife hits the bottle literally, drowning sorrows, real and imagined in expensive Chardonnay or whatever else is on hand. Although Julia loves her new environment with the youthful abandon, she must battle to assimilate her changing family dynamic. Certain traumatic events push her prematurely toward adulthood with unforgiving hands, but in the end she surfaces from the churning chaos of her home life. She learns to cope with a her own personal demons and two life-affirming events draw them allawell almost allaback together, dramatically changed but stronger.