kali

Dead on about the easy loves. And you know, the best thing is that this makes both Harriet's long resistance and her capitulation the more believable. Even when they've taken refuge in each other, they know that it's not a place of total safety; they have to keep working at their happiness and there's always an element of risk. That lack of complacency, that sense that both their friendship and their passion contain minefields -- that's a tremendously difficult thing to write; it must also have seemed a fairly radical view of marriage at its time (since people who held those sorts of values often chose not to marry).