Constance: A Novel

The cool, beautiful Constance Schuyler lives alone in Manhattan in the early 1960s. At a literary party, she meets Sidney Klein, a professor of poetry twenty years her senior. Sidney is a single father with a poor marital record, and he pursues Constance with relentless determination. Eventually she surrenders, accepts his marriage proposal, and moves, with some dread, into his dark, book-filled apartment.

She can't settle in. She's tortured by memories of the bitterly unhappy childhood she...