Fennel and Rue

A successful novelist is drawn into a correspondence with a reader who writes as a dying invalid to learn how his serial will end, discovers that the letters were a girl's hoax, and then meets her at a country-house party. Howells wrote it late, in 1908, about the literary trade he had presided over for forty years, and the question is less who deceived whom than who can forgive it. Fifty-three plates by painters including William Merritt Chase and Childe Hassam, from 1873 to 1928, gather gray days, rainy streets, and quiet interiors that echo the novel's small deceptions and slow reckonings.