Stephania

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1953. Book Club. Hardcover. Good. No Stock Photos! We photograph every item. 375 pages; edge wear to jacket and boards; some wrinkling to jacket; At some time in life most of us have been involved in the private world of a hospital. The setting of Stephania is a room in a Swedish hospital for the handicapped. It is the account of a critical year in the lives of three patients in Room Number Two and how they are changed by the hospital and by each other.They are Stephania, a Polish refugee, bitterly determined to have a normal body after the disfigurement from a ghetto and concentration camp. Fröken Nilsson, the provincial spinster whose broken leg cannot bear the gross weight of her secret feedings. And gentle 16-year-old Thura, whose placid acceptance of infantile paralysis keeps her completely immobile.Stephania is walled in by pride, arrogant in her determination to be cured and contemptuous of those who lack her bitter strength. No one dreamed that it would be she who would effect a positive physical change in the lives of Thura and Fröken Nilsson. And her own cure might be more in spirit than the body.