Princess Puck

"Princess Puck" by Una L. Silberrad is a novel written in the early 20th century. Set in rural England, it follows Wilhelmina “Bill” Alardy, the awkward youngest niece of a fading schoolmistress, as she is sent to Ashelton to “grow up” amid village routines, gossip, and farm life. Around Bill orbit her poised cousin Theresa, Theresa’s flawed farmer-husband Robert Morton, and the outsider-farmer Gilchrist Harborough, with clergy and local ladies shaping the social weather. It reads as a domestic and social coming-of-age, attentive to class, marriage, and the gap between ideal and ordinary human nature. The opening of the story traces the decision to send Bill from Miss Brownlow’s declining school in Wrugglesby to stay with the newly married Theresa at Ashelton. Bill’s blunt conversations with schoolmates reveal her curiosity about men, marriage, and propriety, and her inner life is set against Theresa’s tidy new household. At Haylands farm, Bill cheerfully throws herself into chores, while Robert Morton’s drunken return from market—managed discreetly by Bill with the help of neighbor Harborough—introduces the first crack in Theresa’s ideal marriage. Bill later debates Harborough about loyalty, weakness, and what wives can bear, and she begins to meet Ashelton society through a prayer-meeting led by the self-satisfied curate, tea visits with observant spinsters, and Sunday church with the shadowy Harborough family chapel. She mimics the curate in private, takes in the village’s talk of old county families, and finds a county history bearing her grandmother’s name.

Princess Puck, by Una L. Silberrad. Republished by OpenStories from Project Gutenberg eBook #76967.