Complete and unabridged, this edition is sure to become the definitive modern text of this epic novel from 1888 by Mrs. Humphrey Ward. This book caused a sensation when it was originally published, challenging established cultural mores regarding the practice of religion. This edition has been carefully crafted from the original with the spelling updated to modern American standards, and the foreign words and phrases faithfully annotated so that an English speaking readers may enjoy the work fully without knowing Latin, Greek, German, or French. This was one of the most influential books of its time, and holds up well today both as a compelling story and as a study in late Victorian culture. ---Excerpt--- About four o'clock on the afternoon of the day which was to be marked in the annals of Long Whindale as that of Mrs. Thornburgh's 'high tea, ' that lady was seated in the vicarage garden, her spectacles on her nose, a large couvre-pied over her knees, and the Whinborough newspaper on her lap. The neighborhood of this last enabled her to make an intermittent pretence of reading; but in reality the energies of her house-wifely mind were taken up with quite other things. The vicar's wife was plunged in a housekeeping experiment of absorbing interest. All her solid preparations for the evening were over, and in her own mind she decided that with them there was no possible fault to be found. The cook, Sarah, had gone about her work in a spirit at once lavish and fastidious, breathed into her by her mistress. No better tongue, no plumper chickens, than those which would grace her board to-night were to be found, so Mrs. Thornburgh was persuaded, in the district. And so with everything else of a substantial kind. On this head the hostess felt no anxieties.