The Catherine Wheel: A Novel

Jean Stafford’s third and final novel, The Catherine Wheel, is a mordant tour de force concerning the gradual disintegration of a woman under pressures both societal and self-imposed.

Katharine Congreve, a Boston society figure, is summering at her country house in Hawthorne, Maine, in the late 1930s, looking after the children of her cousin Maeve, as she does every year. Maeve and her husband, John Shipley, spend their summers in Europe, leaving their son and two daughters in Katharine’s ca...