A Prologue to Love — Taylor Caldwell

In A Prologue To Love Taylor Caldwell has written a profoundly moving novel of a woman, rich beyond imagining, whose inability to give or accept love, whose fear of poverty and hostility towards the world brings in its wake tragedy and unhappiness for almost all whose lives she touches.

Caroline Ames was detested by the father she worshiped. An unscrupulous businessman, John Ames denied Caroline not only of his love, but instilled in her a horror of poverty and a faith in the power of money which was to make her the richest woman in the world -- and one of the loneliest.

Miss Caldwell writes of three generations of the Ames family with great insight and compassion. Set in and around Boston during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, she has evoked the period of the great American fortunes through the intricate pattern of a family's destiny. And she has peopled her novel with characters of unusual depth -- all of whom come under the shadow of the strange recluse, Caroline Ames, and the power of her millions.
Perhaps Miss Caldwell's most impressive achievement in A Prologue To Love is her ability to evoke the reader's sympathy for Caroline -- why it was that she so desperately needed to amass so much money at the expense of family love and community respect, and how, in the end, she comes to realize that her father's teachings were so wrong.

It is an inspiring story of the power of love and faith in overcoming evil.