![]() ![]() Bacon is keen to have Emmie back, as when she turns fourteen she may leave school and start bringing home a wage.) ![]() She staunchly confronts and turns away Emmie’s horrid mother when she comes looking for her offspring. Straight to Miss Stanton flees Emmie, and Miss Stanton does her best for her protegé. Luckily (or perhaps unluckily?) Emmie is an intelligent child, a natural scholar, and she catches the eye and attention of one of her school teachers, which comes in handy when the thirteen-year-old flees the maternal home to escape a brutal attempted rape by her mother’s boyfriend. She’s not a “wanted” child, nor are her numerous siblings. ![]() Her mother tries to abort her, and that pretty well sets the scene for Emmie’s childhood years. ![]() Our young protagonist, Emmie Bacon, starts out in life with all the disadvantages possible, being raised in the rural country cottage equivalent of a dismal slum. Let me say right now, this is a fantastic little novel, and it’s worth getting past that awful title. White Hell of Pity went off on another tangent, that of contemporary realism, with a splash of the darkly gothic which was to show up so very often in Lofts’ subsequent 40+ books. This was Norah Lofts’ third published book, after a book of connected short stories, I Met a Gypsy (1935), and a historical fiction, Here Was a Man: A Romantic History of Sir Walter Raleigh (1936). White Hell of Pity by Norah Lofts ~ 1937. ![]()
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