Against the season

AGAINST THE SEASON is a consciously old-fashioned, stylicized [sic] novel about cycles of birth, growth, and death ... An old woman comes to terms with her dead sister while reading her diaries, her pregnant housekeeper teaches her shy grandnephew a little courage; a middle-aged couple yearn to overcome loneliness, an elderly couple court in the face of public ridicule, and Dina Pyros, used furniture dealer and town butch, is courted, public and privately, by Rosemary Hopwood, social worker, nervous, aristocractic and very determined.