Fellowship Point
A Novel
This tour-de-force novel from an award-winning author is the triumphant story of a lifelong friendship between two singular women across the arc of the 20th century. When Agnes Lee receives her third cancer diagnosis at the age of eighty, she focuses on securing her legacy. First, as an author: though a celebrated children’s book author, she has struggled to begin what she knows will be the final volume of her popular, pseudonymously written Franklin Square series of novels. But even more consuming is her determination to find a way to permanently protect Fellowship Point, a peninsula of majestic coast in Maine acquired by five like-minded Quaker families in the 1870s. Agnes is determined to dissolve a generations-old partnership agreement in order to donate the land to a trust and thereby protect it from potential development after her death. Long used to getting her way, Agnes is confident she can convince the two surviving shareholders—her lifelong best friend Polly Wister, and her favorite nephew Archie Lee—to go along with her plan. Polly Wister has led a different kind of life than Agnes: that of a well-off married woman with children, defined by her devotion to her husband, a philosophy professor with an inflated sense of stature. She exalts in creating beauty and harmony in her home, in her friendships, and in her family life. When Agnes proposes her plan for Fellowship Point, Polly finds her loyalties torn between the wishes of her best friend and those of her eldest son who is in line to be the next shareholder. But what is it that Polly herself wants? Agnes’s designs are further muddied when an enterprising young book editor named Maud Silver sets out to convince Agnes to write her memoirs. Agnes’s resistance cannot prevent long-buried memories and secrets from coming to light with far-reaching repercussions for all. Fellowship Point reads like a classic 19th-century novel in its beautifully woven, multilayered narrative and it is entirely contemporary in the themes it explores: a deep and empathic interest in women’s lives, the class differences that divide us, the struggle to protect the natural world, and, above all, a reckoning with intimacy, history, and posterity. It is a masterful achievement from Alice Elliott Dark.