The dark but seductive tale of five generations of Southern women and the house that was both their greatest inheritance and their most confining prison. In 1904, Ruth Yancey is only ten years old when she is brought to live at the magnificent mansion called Fox's Earth. But the impoverished daughter of an abusive mill worker has already internalized her mother's steely code: Men may hold all the power, but a woman possesses one thing that can get her anything in the world she wants...if she's prepared to make certain sacrifices. Deserted by her mother in order to give her a better chance at wealth, Ruth's own ambition drives her to possess Fox’s Earth at any cost, even though her sacrifice will ultimately be her own husband, children, and grandchildren. "A splendid book...absolutely mesmerizing!" -- Chicago Tribune Book World Anne Rivers Siddons was born in a small railroad town just south of Atlanta, where her family has lived for six generations. She attended Auburn University and later joined the staff of Atlanta magazine. Her first novel, Heartbreak Hotel , a story of her college days at Auburn, was later made into a movie called Heart of Dixie , starring Ally Sheedy. Since then she has written fifteen more novels, many of which have been bestsellers. Recently, a movie version of her later novel The House Next Door was aired on LifeTime Network. Ms. Siddons now divides her time between Atlanta and Brooklin, Maine. Chapter One By two P.M. they had walked for half an hour, the man and his family, and the sweat of that sun-blanched September Saturday in 1903 lay sour in waistbands and collars and dampened pale hair and ran rank down thin necks and backs and legs. Pink dust puffed and flew from beneath the wheels of passing wagons and buggies, coating wet skin miserably and mingling with residual traces of cotton lint and waste to catch in the creases of elbows and neck and in hair. The dust was the effluvia of the great brick mill behind them to the south, where they all worked... all except the small girl and the woman. It had not rained for nearly six weeks, and the small town lay in a near-coma of drought and unrelenting heat. In the town, in backyards and browning gardens and over fences, the wives of the small merchants and liverymen and smiths and draymen paused over their black-iron washpots, their chicken coops, and their clotheslines. Steaming in close-buttoned, high-collared shirtwaists and long, swathing skirts, viciously bound in viselike, back-laced corsets, they pushed back straggling hair and mopped red faces and sighed to one another. "Cruel hot, ain't it?" "Will it ever rain?" "Have you got summer sickness at your house? Two of mine are down with it." "Dear Lord, we need rain." Downtown, their husbands struggled against the relentless pall of dust that lay over their stores and wagons and wares, and hauled water for their stock, and scanned the white-bronze sky a dozen times a day. The bell on the volunteer fire wagon rang frequently, and old Dr. Hopkins's buggy and young Dr. Hopkins's phaeton were seen often on the choking streets. Voices dropped, faces stilled, heads turned slowly when the bell rang and the buggy rolled. With the murderous heat and drought came the threat of the summer murderers: Fire. Typhoid, in stagnant and diminished wells and rain barrels and reservoirs. Infantile paralysis, from no one knew where. But outside the town, in the rolling pink and green fields, the farmers sweated and stank and stumbled and drank more often from the water wagon... and smiled. "Good for the cotton, though, ain't it?" "Cotton looks real good this year. Real good." "Heard in town that cotton might go as high as twelve this fall, maybe higher." Cotton! In Sparta, and all over the Deep South in that malignant third September of the new century, cotton was once more the lifeblood of the red land. For the first time since the guns of Sumter, in Charleston, tolled the death knell of the great plantations and the slave nation that supported them, southern agriculture was reversing its sickening downward spiral... or, at least, the descent was becoming markedly less precipitous. And once again it was cotton that fueled the march back to prosperity and former glory. Not cotton in the role it had played before the war, when black backs broke in endless red fields to send the white tide surging north to mills and manufacturers. But cotton in a new role: grown by small farmers on small, poor farms, hauled in their own homemade, iron-wheeled wagons by lean-honed mules into the nearest town, to be sold on marketing day and fed into the maws of the great, forbidding mills that had sprung up across the southern earth like ravenous mushrooms. After the Civil War there had been only a scant handful of crude mills operating in the South; by 1900, four hundred mills bulked dark against the sky. And across the South, more than a quarter of a million of the white tenant farmers an