This novel is in part the true story of the founding of a New England town, but it is first and foremost the imagined chronicle of a woman's mind and heart.

In 1737 Ephraim Williams, with his wife and six of his children, left their comfortable home near Boston to travel through the wilderness to Indian Town, a mission settlement on the western border of Massachusetts Bay Province. There the best hopes of both English and Indians were centered in a unique educational and political experiment under the leadership of the young missionary John Sergeant, recently graduated from Yale College. The Williams family had been chosen as the first of four families to live at the mission and to teach the Indians by force of example the virtues of the Christian religion and the English way of life.

The Prospering tells the story of Elizabeth, youngest of the three Williams daughters, and is an account, seen through her eyes, of the men and women famous in Berkshire history. In the difficult years of her growing up, Elizabeth witnesses the evolution of the mission settlement into the gracious and beautiful town of Stockbridge. Uncertain of her role in an ambitious family and torn by loyalties she could never reconcile, she does at last find in this town her own happiness and fulfillment, but she acknowledges in her heart the cost.

For this is also the story of a failure—on the part of both Englishman and Indian—to carry out the plan which to the young and visionary John Sergeant seemed so reasonable and so clearly a part of God's purpose. The Stockbridge mission is a calculable tragedy of the westward retreat of the Indians, and we better understand the reasons why the white man and the red have never been able to "keep the chain of friendship bright" between them.

The Prospering is a book not only for everyone interested in American history but for every student of the human heart.

From the dust jacket