Amanda is rich, bored and middle-aged, a would-be-writer who has left her husband and traded New Orleans for the hill country of Arkansas. There she is happily translating an obscure 18th-century French poetess whose illicit affair led to imprisonment and suicide.Amanda finds herself infatuated with a student. What starts as a fling becomes a grand and impossible passion. Then she discovers she is pregnant, as was the woman whose poems she re-creates, and we watch as the parallel stories of these two women unfold, each ending tragically."Gilchrist's manner is both stylish and idiomatic--a rare and potent combination." (Times Literary Supplement)