Fortune’s Rocks was published by Little, Brown in 1999, the first in what would become Shreve’s loosely connected series of novels set in the same fictional coastal New Hampshire location. The time is 1899; Olympia Biddeford is the precocious daughter of a prominent family spending the summer at their seaside cottage. John Haskell is a physician and progressive reformer, married, the father of four, a friend of Olympia’s father. Their affair — initiated over a single summer — shatters both families and produces a child who is taken from Olympia and given to foster care.
The novel’s second half follows Olympia four years later as she returns to Fortune’s Rocks to fight for custody of her daughter. This legal battle — a woman against the institutional machinery of early twentieth-century family law — is Shreve’s real subject. Olympia is intelligent, articulate, and completely powerless: the law regards her as a fallen woman, the community regards her as a scandal, and her own family regards her as a source of shame.
Shreve writes the period with authority — the corseted social conventions, the legal structures that treated women as property, the progressive reform movements that were changing labor conditions while leaving gender relations untouched. The beach setting is gorgeously evoked, all salt air and weathered shingles and the constant sound of surf, and Shreve uses the ocean as a persistent metaphor without making it heavy-handed.
Collecting Fortune’s Rocks
First edition (Little, Brown, Boston, 1999): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$40
- Very good/very good: $5–$15
- Signed: $40–$100