A Good Inheritance - a book by Ms Heather Rheece
(2010-04-20 at 15:16:20 )

It is very seldom, at my age of 65 that I am mesmerized by a book
that does not deal with politics, food, oriental medicine. or
yin-yang practices!!

This book, however, took me right out of my usual life, and each
day found me so eager to read the next chapter that I could not
concentrate on looking for errors as I had been asked to do.

At times my sensitivities were so shaken that I had to stop reading
until I regained my composure. I was indeed very moved by this book!!

It is available at:

A Good Inheritance


The Heather Rheece Preface To A Good Inheritance

This is a book that more or less wrote itself.
I have had no ambitions to write a novel since I said goodbye to
adolescence several decades ago, and if I had wanted to write one,
I would have chosen a theme and a background that I knew something
about.

You are a fool if you do not. Until about ten years ago, I knew nothing
about nineteenth and early twentieth century America and I still know
less than I should like. But then I did not choose the Pascoes; they
chose me and commissioned me to tell their story.

And, whether I liked it or not, they were an American family. So I had
little option but to stumble along behind them and learn their world as
I went along. Where I did not have the information, I simply left a gap.

There were many such gaps in the beginning. Gradually those gaps were
filled. I found myself reading books and visiting websites that would
never have interested me before. Sometimes I found what I was looking
for. But more often information came to me by serendippity. I learned
to recognise the cold shiver of recognition that told me I had found
something relevant. No doubt there are still many mistakes, for which
I crave my readers indulgence.

I knew from the first that the book could never be published
through the conventional channels. I am much too old to go through
the exhausting and humiliating process of sending a manuscript from
publisher to publisher and putting up with all the letters of rejection
in the hope that finally an attempt will succeed. I simply do not have
the time or the energy for that. Besides, I doubt if any publisher
would be interested in a story in which nobody commits adultery, most
of the marriages are happy, and the only violence comes from the
Ku Klux Klan.

Happy and stable marriages were not all that rare when I was growing up,
but they certainly do not sell books!

So I am simply making this available on the Web to anyone who manages
to find it and is interested in reading it. If you like it, that is
fine. And if not, I shall not be too much troubled.

The most important thing for me is that my twelve-year labour is over
and my child safely delivered.

It is customary to say at this point that all the characters are
fictitious and that none of them are based on any real persons, living
or dead except, of course, for General Lee and his wife, who make a
brief but important appearance in the first chapter. And that statement
would be true enough so far as this world is concerned. I have made use
of some real institutions: for example the Church of St. Mary of the
Visitation does exist and has long served the Irish population of Iowa
City, but you will no find Father Connolly or Father Jamieson on the
list of past parish priests. Nor of course will you find a Professor
Henry Pascoe among the past faculty of the College of Liberal Arts in
the University of Iowa or the Travis family on the census records of
Lexington, Va. The small towns of Danby Hills in Illinois and
Hartsville in Georgia are likewise fictitious places.

And yet these people have, right from the beginning, seemed so real
and vivid to me and have become such close friends that I am unable to
regard them as wholly fictitious and am inclined to believe that there
is a world parallel to ours in which they are indeed real, and lived
and died exactly as I have described.