The Vicar's Daughter
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Book Overview
A stranger arrives at the vicarage with a letter, a cousin draws entirely the wrong conclusion, and one late-summer week takes a settled household apart.
The Stacks come home from two months away to learn that a young woman named Caroline turned up in their absence, carrying a letter that asked Edward, the vicar, for help. Maurice, the cousin who held the parish while they were gone, has decided she must be Edward's illegitimate child, and has quietly placed her as housekeeper with the neighbouring Blunts. Margaret, Edward's wife, and Maurice, who has loved her silently for twenty years, spend the following days holding two secrets between them, each trying to spare somebody else. Hilary, nineteen, is the daughter of the title.
Published in 1928, The Vicar's Daughter has the outline of a farce - mistaken identity, crossed motives, people hurrying between houses - and E. H. Young plays every bit of it straight, so that the comedy keeps turning into something more uncomfortable. Emily Hilda Young (1880-1949) published eleven novels in all, and the one before this, Miss Mole, had just won her the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. The novel's real question is how much damage a kind man can do by guessing, and how little anyone can be certain of anyone else.
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