Ceremony of the Innocent Author:Taylor Caldwell Ellen Watson was born into servitude. The humiliating life of hard toil was the only one she ever knew. Until Jeremy Porter. The eminently successful New York Lawyer saw a ravishingly beautiful woman in the rough and tattered serving girl. He saw the woman he was going to marry! — ----------- — One of this country's most acclaimed novelists return... more »s to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America as the setting for her most personal novel: the parallel stories of a woman and a country--and the loss of innocence.
From a life of servitude in a small Pennsylvania town, Ellen Watson is catapulted into a life she was never prepared to live--a life she never quite believes herself worth of. As the bride of Jeremy Porter, scion of a wealthy eastern family, she enters into a world of politics, wealth, and power, a world where hypocrisy and ruthlessness reign.
And against the background of a crumbling American Dream, as a nation comes fully of age and faces the First World War, Ellen loses the one man who can protect her . . . and a country loses the man who perhaps could have saved it from the raw and brutal ambition of the sons of Cain.
Taylor Calwell has written a broad-backed, shattering epic of a woman and a nation--both betrayed by their own misplaced trusts and by a dangerous innocence that had once been their greatest strength.« less