Olive : A Novel (1875)

This powerful work, the only edition of Olive available, traces its eponymous heroine's progress from her ill-starred birth to maturity as a painter and wife, offering a fascinating study of deformity and race relations. Crippled Olive Rothesay must not only win her parents' affection but also overcome their initial disgust at her physical "imperfection," a curvature of the spine. Published three years after Jane Eyre, Olive's swift fictional response to Bronte's novel raises questions of family, race, andnation through the story of Olive's struggle to take her place in the world as artist and woman.