A mother in turmoil. A jaded daughter. A community to help them heal… Portia Foster has a big heart—so does her mother—yet something is terribly wrong with their relationship. That’s why Portia decides to take a long break on the farm where her mother grew up. But after a short stay, in the religious and ultra conservative home of her grandparents, she begins to question the longstanding walls that separate her mother from everyone in her family. Portia’s search for answers uncovers a tragedy buried for over forty years. From her discoveries, she begins to see the emotional scars keeping her family apart and the causes of her mother’s turmoil. Urged on by the desire to help her family, this compassionate twenty-seven-year-old sets out on a journey to mend old wounds. Had Portia known how complicated things would get, she might never have started out on her mission to make things better. Luckily, she finds a community to guide her to more than she imagined was possible.

Charles Hamilton, esteemed Headmaster of the independent Bartford Academy, finds himself torn between professional fulfilment and a desire to escape private complexities. As the leader of one of Britain’s most prestigious boarding schools, the embattled teacher must perform daily struggles, with a range of suffocating and self-absorbed characters, resulting in growing personal doubt and a worrying reduction in spirit. Private Matters offers a witty and wistful observation of the great British boarding school, its complex tapestry and myriad colourful lives within. As Summer Term ends, Bartford’s once-familiar landscape undergoes complete transformation, revealing an intricate web of relationships, challenging the institution’s longstanding traditions and, possibly, stakeholder perception.

Today we enjoy more privacy than ever before, yet the encroachment of the media, computer data gathering, and electronic surveillance in our lives undermines our sense that we have privacy at all. Although privacy is essential to our capacity to love and create and think, it can be used for the wrong reasons. The same condition that sustains intimacy, creativity, and freedom can also be invoked as an abusive kind of secrecy. In Private Matters, Janna Malamud Smith explores this paradox through various prisms: the bedroom, the psychiatrist’s couch, the biography, the presidency, the media, women and their bodies, and post–9/11 policy. More pertinent than ever before, this modern history of privacy offers important insights into the role of this increasingly elusive and fragile virtue.

"And while other forms of public literature provided blueprints for ordering the household, domestic tragedies continued to reveal the tensions lying under the surface there: inconsistencies in the prescribed role of women, contradictions within patriarchal ideology, conflicts between political and economic interests in the household, inadequacies in the old ideals of friendship and benefice, and anxieties about the control of material possessions."--BOOK JACKET.