From the book cover: "Young Cassandra is alone in the world, her father had just died. When she goes to Cropthorne Manor as a governess, its weary facade and crumbling statues are all that she could hope for. And Marion Vanbrugh is the perfect employer - a widower, austere and distant, with a penchant for Greek. But this is not a ninteenth-century novel and Cassandra's Mr. Rochester isn't the only inhabitant of the Manor. There's Tom, irascible and discontented, Margaret, pregnant and voracious, the ineffectual Tinty and the eccentric, domineering Nanny. Just as Jane Austen wittily contrasted real life with a girl's Gothic fantasies in Northhanger Abbey, so Elizabeth Taylor subtly examines the realities of life for a latter-day Jan Eyre in this sharply observed work, first published in 1946."