Ivan's Reviews > Patience & Sarah

This is a great “American” novel; a love story, an odyssey and a chronicle of two remarkable lives. In this short novel Miller paints a large portrait on a relatively small canvas and with Patience and Sarah she has created two indelible characters. There is a perfection of expression mixed with an eloquent, economical prose style. Here is the heroic depiction of a love that refuses to remain unrequited or diminished by the provincial standards of a morally pious society.

Set in Connecticut circa 1816, we are introduced to Patience, a spinster (by choice) in her late twenties; she is a woman of means. By contrast, Sarah (22) is a farmer’s daughter, uneducated and raised as a boy to assist with the arduous tasks of farm life. One day Sarah delivers a load of firewood to the property Patience shares with her brother Edward and his wife Martha. Call it kismet, but from the moment the two women clap eyes on one another their destinies are married. Miller adroitly articulates the myriad of feelings experienced by our heroines as they traverse love's often rocky landscape.

Besides the titular characters, Miller has thoroughly fleshed out the conflicted Edward, bitter Martha, and Sarah’s brutally moral father. Best of all is Parson Peel, a defrocked clergyman now writer and bookseller who travels the back roads in a gypsy caravan and picks up the vagabond Sarah. Peel mentors her, teaches her to read and provides a warm bed, all the while believing her to be a young man named “Sam.”

Originally self-published in 1969 with the title “A Place for Us,” and subsequently issued in 1971 by a main-stream publisher, “Patience and Sarah” holds the distinction of being the first recipient of the American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Award