The Peppered Moth

The Peppered Moth by Margaret Drabble In the early 1900s
Bessie Bawtry a small child with big notions lives in a
South Yorkshire mining town in England. Precocious and
refined in a land of little ambition and much mining grime
Bessie waits for the day she can escape the bleak coarse
existence her ancestors had seldom questioned. Nearly a
century later Bessies granddaughter Faro Gaulden is
listening to a lecture on genetic inheritance. She has
returned to the depressed little town in which Bessie grew
up and wonders at the families who never left. Confronted
with what would have been her life had her grandmother
stayed she finds herself faced with difficult questions.
Is she really so different from the South Yorkshire
locals? As she soon learns the past has a way of
reasserting itself-not unlike the peppered moth that was
once thought to be nearing extinction but is now enjoying
a sudden unexplained resurgence. The Peppered Moth is a
brilliant novel full of irony sadness and humor.