Rachel Curtis is clever, means well, and is certain she knows how to improve the world; she takes up a charity, a lace school and an admirable philanthropist, and every single thing she does is a disaster. Yonge lived her whole life in one Hampshire village and taught Sunday school there for seventy-one years; this 1865 novel is her hardest, and its target — the intelligent woman with nothing to do and no training to do it — is treated with far more sympathy than the title suggests.