SAPPHIRA AND THE SLAVE GIRL

A sharply etched story of a Virginia homsestead, a mill house rather than a plantation, and of Sapphira, the mistress, chained to her chair, and tuned, often wrongly, to the currents and undercurrents of life flowing around her. And of her relations with Nancy, doomed by her white blood, to be ""different"" from the other slaves on the place. It isn't Willa Cather at her best, it seems a little thin blooded after Lost Lady, but it is deceptive in its simplicity and gathers significance with perspective.