A Fallen Woman
Though a saga in length, Carson’s sequel reads like a soapy melodrama as it follows the characters from A Country Girl in their sexual misadventures, child-bearing, and other misfortunes in business and love in England’s Black Country in 1892.
Lovely, unfaithful Aurelia Sampson, the fallen woman of the title, connects the characters of this ensemble cast in which men are measured by their financial success and women judged by their beauty. Her faithless spouse, Benjamin Sampson, neglects his failing business to romp with his mistress while initiating a divorce; Algie Stokes builds a competing business and denies his attraction to Aurelia to preserve his marriage to Marigold, Aurelia’s half-sister; and Clarence Froggatt, Aurelia’s ex-fiancé, weds plain Harriet Meese and inherits an unexpected fortune. A lively subplot features Benjamin pursuing the gorgeous Kate Stokes, a high-stepping chorus girl.
The prose is as stiff as a whalebone corset in some spots, but the dramatic action of bedroom and courtroom, shop floor and office, grand home and hovel keeps the pace moving. Carson’s late Victorian world of industry and commerce mixes a touch of Dickensian grit with Downton Abbey’s fashionable gloss, never letting its characters suffer more than they can stand.
