It Was Like This

A powerful, romantic drama set in the deep south of the late 1800s, a novel the Lexington Herald hailed as "a tiny masterpiece of style, of subtlety, of studied artistry." Back in print for the first time in nearly 75 years.

The lives of widow Louisa Martin, her two adult sons Hugh and Lawrence, and her adopted daughter Anna on an isolated pecan plantation in Southern Mississippi in the late 1800s.

In this isolation, Hugh falls in love with Anna, who thinks of him as a brother, so he leaves to become a newspaper reporter... and she marries his younger brother Lawrence, creating more than a little friction in a family already beset by troubles.

"The quiet enchantment of Winslow's prose has won for her an ever-widening circle of admirers. This book is a brilliant example of her art, a slight but exquisitely polished fragment of fiction that sheds an uncommon lustre. Winslow makes such wise and triumphant use of her materials [and], with her astonishingly subtle craftsmanship, gradually develops a tense love story of incredible beauty." Sunday News (Lancaster, PA)

"A deep and stirring drama. The risks her characrters run are more thrilling than the hurdles over which more obvious novelists put their fictional puppets." Tulsa World

"A quietly perfect re-creation of a world that is gone by a writer who loved it well.Passion is subdued and suffering muted in this charming, nostalgic, eminently civilized account of a gifted young man who loves his brother's wife." The Evening Star (Washington DC)

"Anne Goodwin Winslow's little books are precious bits of literature. For the literary epicure, there is nothing to equal a story by Anne Goodwin Winslow. " Lexington Herald