Gratia's Trials

This February 1888 issue of Street & Smith's Select Series contains "Gratia's Trials; or, Making Her Own Way" by Lucy Randall Comfort, a domestic melodrama centered on a young farm girl's mistreatment. Fifteen-year-old Gratia Kempfield lives on a rural farmhouse in the Catskills, her mother gravely ill in an isolated sick-room. Her father, the weak-willed Farmer Ira Kempfield, has hired the manipulative Cousin Almira Bassett as nurse and housekeeper. Almira systematically isolates Gratia from her dying mother, assigns her menial labor, and tyrannizes both the sick woman and her daughter. When Gratia attempts to visit her mother, Almira forcibly ejects her and manipulates her father into forbidding further contact. In the sick-room, Almira's facade crumbles—she neglects Mrs. Kempfield's comfort, administers medicine on whim, and threatens violence when the weakened woman pleads to see her daughter. Almira gloats about eventually controlling Gratia after her mother's death.