The Peppered Moth

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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001 - Fiction - 369 pages
In the early 1900s, Bessie Bawtry, a small child with big notions, lives in a South Yorkshire mining town in England. Precocious and refined in a land of little ambition and much mining grime, Bessie waits for the day she can escape the bleak, coarse existence her ancestors had seldom questioned.
Nearly a century later Bessie's granddaughter, Faro Gaulden, is listening to a lecture on genetic inheritance. She has returned to the depressed little town in which Bessie grew up and wonders at the families who never left. Confronted with what would have been her life had her grandmother stayed, she finds herself faced with difficult questions. Is she really so different from the South Yorkshire locals? As she soon learns, the past has a way of reasserting itself-not unlike the peppered moth that was once thought to be nearing extinction but is now enjoying a sudden unexplained resurgence.
The Peppered Moth is a brilliant novel, full of irony, sadness, and humor.

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Contents

prologue
Chapter 1
3
Chapter 2
5
Chapter 3
16
Chapter 4
27
Chapter 5
39
Chapter 6
53
Chapter 7
66
Chapter 15
171
Chapter 16
178
Chapter 17
196
Chapter 18
200
Chapter 19
225
Chapter 20
248
Chapter 21
277
Chapter 22
303

Chapter 8
72
Chapter 9
75
Chapter 10
89
Chapter 11
99
Chapter 12
118
Chapter 13
122
Chapter 14
151
Chapter 23
314
Chapter 24
325
Chapter 25
332
Chapter 26
355
Afterword
365
Copyright

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About the author (2001)

Margaret Drabble was born on June 5, 1939 in Sheffield, England. She attended The Mount School in York and Newnham College, Cambridge University. After graduation, she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford during which time she understudied for Vanessa Redgrave. She is a novelist, critic, and the editor of the fifth edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Her works include A Summer Bird Cage; The Millstone, which won the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize in 1966; Jerusalem the Golden, which won James Tait Black Prize in 1967; and The Witch of Exmoor. She also received the E. M. Forster award and was awarded a Society of Authors Travelling Fellowship in the 1960s and the Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1980.

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