Brigid's Dilemma — Laura Joyce Moriarty

About the book . . .
After Rosemary O'Connor finds her abusive husband sneaking into her young daughter's bedroom, she spends the next few years physically fighting him off to protect her beautiful Brigid. In the end, Rosemary saves her from her father, but is unable to shield Brigid from a ravaging stranger, a man nearly twice her age, who uses the young girl's desperate desire for love to seduce her.

Once she learns her daughter is pregnant, as if tempting fate, Rosemary suffers a final altercation. She sends Brigid away while secretly condemning her husband to prison.

Rosemary's scheme was to save Brigid from a pitiless society that oppressed unwed mothers during the early days of the 1900s. But she frightens her in the process. As a result, vestiges of her fear and caution keeps her desire for a husband perpetually fettered--- and then each time she is ready to fall in love, fate intervenes.