The Ladies of Missalonghi

The Ladies of Missalonghi is a short novel by the Australian writer Colleen McCullough, commissioned for the Hutchinson Novellas series and published in the United States in the Harper Short Novel series in 1987. Set in the small Blue Mountains town of Byron in the years before the First World War, it follows Missy Wright, an unmarried woman in her thirties living in poverty with her widowed mother and disabled aunt. Encouraged by her cousin Una, who works at a lending library, Missy finds the courage to break free of her constrained life after the wedding of her cousin Alicia and the arrival of a mysterious stranger named John Smith, eventually gaining financial independence for herself and her female relatives and marrying John Smith. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/