"The Hermitage is a compelling and heartbreaking soliloquy, a farewell to a lover long gone and to the self-imposed exile undertaken by the woman he left behind. On her last night of isolation, the narrator looks back at the almost ten years she has spent as a recluse, reexamining and recording her feelings of tragedy and loss in a final letter to her lover. In the process she sheds her old identity and, with the rising sun, steps into a new self - more redemptive, more hopeful. No longer a discarded object, she passes through an open door, cured of this lover but not of love, her fate unknown but finally her own."--BOOK JACKET.