This ponderous family saga moves from America to Yorkshire. When Helen Bradshaw is 18 in 1919, her beloved father dies. Since she has already estranged herself from her mother and her extended Italian New York family, she believes she is alone in the world. Then she discovers that her father was not just a simple small-town Midwestern college professor, but that he was from a wealthy English family. Helen travels to England to meet her other family and to discover her father's hidden side. She and a rebellious female cousin seek personal identities in nontraditional ways for women during this time of shifting social mores. Kennedy's slow accumulation of details about every family member gradually widens to sweep in more than we want to know about all these characters. For large fiction collections.