The emancipated

Miriam Baske, a young widow, leaves behind the gray stone chapels and flinty hearts of Lancashire for the sun and artistic splendor of Italy -- where she meets a host of her countrymen doing the Grand Tour.To Miriam's surprise, the English abroad are a different breed from those back in the bay of Naples, passion rules over reason. But will life change when they return to their own hearthsides?Reminiscent of George Eliot's Middlemarch , The Emancipated tells us as much about Victorian society -- with all its prejudices and rigid conventions -- as it does about one's woman's growth to human understanding. Published in 1890, it was Gissing's last novel before the more embittered view of New Grub Street -- a proclamation of hope, of freedom in the midst of Victorian darkness.