Portrait of a Marriage

A privileged young painter from Philadelphia travels into rural Pennsylvania in search of a subject and finds one in a farmer's daughter whose directness and physical presence transform his work. He marries her despite his family's objections and leaves much of his former social world behind. Their attraction is genuine, but neither love nor artistic admiration erases the differences in education, speech, ambition and assumptions about what a husband and wife owe one another.

Across decades of children, work and changing prosperity, the marriage becomes a negotiation between the painter's need to create and his wife's command of practical life. She refuses to become merely his model, while he struggles to recognise forms of intelligence that his upbringing taught him to overlook. The novel places their private accommodation within an America moving from the turn of the century through the Depression and toward the Second World War.