In this moving portrait of two women who struggle to find fulfillment in the face of continuous and often hilarious adversity, Harkness explores the conflicts and difficulties of women throughout the world. It was inevitable that Imogen and Jessica should become friends. Both of them precocious and agnostic, both arriving from unconventional homes abroad, coming to attend the same restrictive convent school, they were naturally singled out as different and were forced together in an alliance of outcasts. Years later, the two women sit in the attic of a family home on Lake Maggiore, surrounded by trunks and boxes from which they dig out clothes, photographs, and letters. As they sift through the relics of eccentric school holidays, life at the Sorbonne, years spent apart in Cambridge and Milan, London and Washington, D.C., with husbands, lovers, and children, they are at times doubled up with laughter, at others, close to tears.
Genre: Fiction
Subjects: Friendship - Fiction; Lesbians - Fiction; Modern Fiction; Subjects; Women - Fiction
Publication History
| ISBN | 9780333490785 |
|---|---|
| Copyright Date | 1989 |
| Publication Date | 1989 |
| Publisher | Macmillan London |
| Format | Unknown Binding |
| No. of Pages | 380 |
| Language | English |
| ISBN | 9780552993876 |
|---|---|
| Copyright Date | 1990 |
| Publication Date | April 13, 1990 |
| Publisher | Blackswan |
| Format | Paperback |
| No. of Pages | 448 |
| Language | English |
| ISBN | 9780312136116 |
|---|---|
| Copyright Date | 1995 |
| Publication Date | October 1995 |
| Publisher | St Martins Press |
| Format | Hardcover |
| No. of Pages | 444 |
| Language | English |
Comment
Time of Grace was first published by Macmillan in London in 1989 and in the United States by Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's in 1995. Told largely in flashback, it follows two upper-class Englishwomen, Imogen Holt and Jessica Grantsby-Harte, who become inseparable outcasts at a strict convent school, study at the Sorbonne at the edge of the Paris student protests of the 1960s, and then make bad marriages and bad choices in love with men. Kirkus reported that in the end the two soulmates become lovers and live happily ever after with their children, brought together by their shared anger at the men who had used them.
Publishers Weekly found the novel charming but thin and noted that it was written before Harkness's praised Monsieur de Brillancourt (1994). The love between the two women arrives late, after a lifelong friendship, but it is where the book is going.