CLARA BOWMAN IS LIKE most society women who turn 18 in New York City. Her best friend, Ashley Davis, lived two doors to the west. As did Ashley’s brother Thomas, and all the world knew that Thomas and Clara would marry. It all changed on May 12, 1872. It was a rainy Sunday. The Davises sat in the wrong seats on a train traveling through Queens and were both killed when it crashed.

The questions for this woman are whether she can return to the life predestined for her and whether she wants to. In London, she happens upon an English woman much like her, who is pursuing a different path, through her love or art. There she will also have an unsatisfactory liaison in the bed of a member of the aristocracy.

Nothing will be-or can be-the same on her return to America. This is the story what her new journey becomes.

After a devastating time, Mrs. Bowman takes Clara to London. The pair take to strolling, and on one of their walks they happen upon Felicity Adams. Felicity is not only rich. Her father is a baron. She asked him to let her explore her dreams of becoming an artist, and he agreed, confident she would soon be back and married and bearing grandchildren for him.

Clara is immediately and irretrievably taken in by the simple watercolor of roses among a cluster of bushes that Felicity is creating off the path.

The moment changes Clara’s life. She will, she tells her mother on the crossing home, like to see if she has a calling to be an artist. Her father gives her six months, confident (as the baron was) that his daughter would return to the fold. She would prove him wrong.

She will learn much about men as she struggles to become a woman.

This is Clara Bowman’s story. Of fighting to remain independent. Of confusion about sex. Developing friendships, and one enemy, and falling under the tutelage of a master portraitist. Clara will suffer but she will develop her artist’s touch and find a man she can love.

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This novel is related to Roisin Campbell: An Irishwoman in New York, published in 2020. Many characters in that book appear here and some of their stories after that book’s end are revealed here. This is, however, a separate story. That of Clara Bowman.