"Elizabeth Beaufort: beautiful, impoverished scholar who has eked out a living as a teacher until deafness and a scandal over a book about love intervene. Her lover, Hannah Morgan: ex-Army nurse and teacher of the young who learned as a farm child that she had incredible powers - that she could "see" the future in ways others could not. Daisy Rawles: orphaned niece of the wife of a wealthy scoundrel, whose destiny - marriage to the first available eligible young man - will be short-stopped by her association with... Nell Purcell: independent, aloof and scornful of convention. One of the first women librarians in the "new" Library of Congress. Cast against the first fifty years of the women's movement, the silver scandals of the late nineteenth century, and the political and social turmoil of the years following the Civil War, their lives are shaped and changed by the charismatic guidance of Madame Aurora"--P. [4] of cover.