For most of us, 19th-century American women novelists begin and end with Kate Chopin and Sarah Orne Jewett (assuming, of course, that Harriet Beecher Stowe does not come seriously into the reckoning). This novel, first published in 1862, may make some revision of the shortlist necessary, since it retains a lot of freshness and vitality, without the moralising snobbery and gentility of the period. The setting is a small New England seaport, a tightly confined world whose code and social mores cannot accommodate anything much beyond a humdrum level, and in which new ideas and unfamiliar people are like heavy stones tossed into a pond. The heroine, who is named Cassandra, seems to be partly a self-portrait of the author - apparently an odd, opinionated, intelligent woman married to a poet, and always rather at odds with her era and social milieu.