The Bride's House is the story of a woman who loves two men but finds happiness with neither. Sophie is eager for her marriage to the stable Lynn, believing he will be her anchor, help her in containing what she knows to be her restless and passionate nature. But then she encounters Jerome and allows herself to be seduced, and the novel becomes a study of and "good and " and and "bad and " as defined by the conventions of time and place - shortly before the turn of the century in rural Ohio. Dawn Powell's portrait of Sophie - a woman who is sharply aware of her own needs and inner-conflicts - is a surprisingly modern one in a novel written nearly seventy years ago. In his introduction, Powell's biographer, Tim Page, suggests that Sophie's struggle and her ambivalence may have mirrored the married Powell's involvement with the playwright John Howard Lawson at the time she was writing The Bride's House.