This is a story set against a late eighteenth and early nineteenth centurybackground, telling how the evils of their time affected the lives of threegenerations of women. Kitty Kennedy loses her lover before Carolan is born;Katharine, Carolan's child, chooses what must inevitably be a life ofdanger; but it is Carolan, sensitive and proud, bold and reckless, who mustsuffer most deeply and who is the central figure around whom events revolve.Her adventures in the East End, in Newgate Jail and in the foul women'squarters on the prison ship transporting her to Australia are told withterrible clarity and a powerful imagination. The profligacy, perversion,vice and cruelty of that age are forcefully recreated. Having survived thejourney and been taken to the house of Materman of Sydney, Carolan findsthat her experiences have changed her from an innocent girl to a ruthlesswoman, determined to establish herself in the Masterman household, and hermethod of doing so is such as will haunt her for the rest of her life. Themain characters in this unusual novel are not only vivid but convincing.There is the gay and amorous Marcus, vain Kitty, bawdy Margery and sweetKatharine; there is Masterman who, for love of Carolan, forgets he isambitious and a Puritan; the pious Esther, and Carolan herself--these andmany others, living in a world of crime and horror, dirt and luxury, crueltyand indifference are all reaching out hopefully to better times beyond thesymbolic Blue Mountains.