Aside from Adam, there are also two very capable women in the story who develop and grow significantly throughout the book. One is Adam’s wife, Henrietta. She starts out naive and shallow but with a spark of intelligence waiting to be coaxed into flame. She gradually blossoms and discovers depths and strength you wouldn’t expect, and I ended up actually respecting her. On a scouting expedition, he meets Henrietta, the daughter of a small town mill owner. She is driven by a desire to escape and she finds it with Swann. The novel is about the rise of his business and the development of their romance.

FINALLY! Done and done with a bit of skip-skimming as the author steadfastly refused to smartly wrap things up w/o more tedious hosannas hung onto the title notion. Please ... All in all a decently entertaining book. Would've been better with fewer ruminations about England's gifted males(and some females) and overall wonderfulness. Also too much blah blah about relationships and love and all that sort of thing(as my step-father used to put it). This truth hit home to me more profoundly several years ago when we arrived in the US for seminary. We moved into our campus accommodation and found that one set of neighbours was from West Africa and the other from Texas. Culturally, our three families had very little in common. We had very different tastes in food, music, and sport. Truth be told, our conversations did not flow freely at first. The Adventures of Ben Gunn (a companion novel to Stevenson's Treasure Island telling of events which occurred before that book begins) On a family holiday in Swanage when he was young, Delderfield caught scarlet fever and had to spend three months in an isolation hospital.Hard for me to rate this book. I loved the writing was great and the story of Adam Swann was outstanding, but I lost some interest as the author delved into other characters and dealt with issues and locales that I was not familiar with. But the story of Swann was really well done, loved how he found his wife, loved her eventual maturation and indispensability to the business. For being a family trilogy this book only covered about 10 years from 1856-66, so I am interested in how the will expand the future generations and how far into the future he will carry the story. I have the other two books of this series but will hold off on reading the remaining two books for a bit. Apparently I am behind schedule according to Goodreads and my 2016 reading goal. a b c d Huxley, John; Selinger-Morris, Samantha (9 September 2005). "Forever misquoted, Donald Horne dies". The Sydney Morning Herald . Retrieved 12 June 2013.

They arrived at Adam's home and Henrietta was given into the care of his Aunt Charlotte. Adam spent time with his father. Sam had found out where Henrietta was and came to collect her. She refused to go. Adam took Sam aside and told him what he had seen in regard to the boy. Sam agreed to leave Henrietta with Adam and stated that he would disinherit her. Adam asked Henrietta to marry him. Henrietta agreed to the marriage and Adam told her what he had seen Sam do. Henrietta wasn't at all surprised that her father would do such a thing. The great museum: the re-presentation of history. Leichhardt, New South Wales: Pluto Press. 1984. ISBN 978-0-86104-788-8. I'll admit it. Despite my better judgement, I'm hooked on the series and find the characters engaging. From a more dispassionate perspective, the book is capitalist propaganda. It's propaganda in an interesting way-- it makes points about the rise of business in England in the 19th century, as well as the role of business in political liberalism. But nevertheless, it's propaganda. It's also a weaker book for the fact that tragedy doesn't strike the family, except as a means towards greater accomplishment. I'm curious to see if the third book in the series introduces more realistic drama.Giles, the family scholar, meets his future fiancée as he is walking across the country after he graduates from boarding school. She turns out to be the daughter of a very wealthy industrialist, and though she loves Giles very much, and he loves her, she is vastly spoiled. So much so, that Giles, who is extremely sympathetic to the plight of the working person, finds himself obliged to break up with her shortly before they are due to be married. She promptly disappears, and he is never really the same after that until he finds her again, and discovers, to his surprise, that she has been spending her time finding out for herself what it is like to live like the working class. Curiously, Hill is more forgiving about Cromwell's conduct in Ireland. Of the 1649 bloodbaths in Drogheda and Wexford, from where Cromwell unleashed a murderous savagery out of revenge for the Irish rebellion of 1641 and to ensure there would be no Popish plots against the Commonwealth in England, Hill admits it "is not one of the pleasanter aspects of our hero's career" and he has no desire "to whitewash" his conduct. Nevertheless, "we must get the campaign and its aftermath into historical perspective, and try to see it through the eyes of Cromwell and his contemporaries". Cromwell's progression through Ireland is now widely regarded as an ugly display of bloodthirsty, even genocidal violence towards Irish Catholics.