First Chapter First Paragraph - '...And Ladies Of The Club'

I am linking up with Vicki @ I’d Rather Be At The Beach who hosts a meme every Tuesday to share the First Chapter First Paragraph or two of the book you are currently reading or plan to read soon.

The book I'm going to share today is one that I read originally in the 1980's soon after it was published.  It's quite long and it has not been available in e-book format until recently.  I was delighted to find that Ohio State University Press has made it available that way.  I bet this is a book that some of you have heard of or read in the past.  The author, Helen Hooven Santmyer, was 86 or 87 when this book originally came out in 1982.  Wow!  Here's a small sample:

'...And Ladies of the Club'

by Helen Hooven Santmyer

First Paragraph(s):

*1868*

'The formation of the Waynesboro Woman's Club was first proposed in the early summer of 1868.'

The Waynesboro Female College in the eighteen fifties and sixties was a fitting subject, along with the Court House, the churches, the 'gentlemen's mansions,' for a steel engraving of the sort then fashionable.  The two College buildings were well back from the street behind an iron fence and a wide, deeply shaded campus.  A brick wall led from the gate; it divided midway in its course, one branch leading straight to the dormitory, the other turning right to the classroom building.  From the gate the two looked to be identical: severely rectangular facades, entrance doors deeply recessed above a half-dozen granite steps with iron handrails, the windows of three floors set in exact pairs, one pair above another up to the wooden cornices and the brackets supporting the wide overhang of almost flat roofs.  But one of these College buildings, as an engraving must have shown, was larger than the other: the classroom hall was cubical, with one chimney towering above each corner of the roof; the dormitory had much more depth than width, and along the edge of the roof on both sides, front to back, stood rows of double chimneys, evidence of coal fireplaces in every room.  The house where the owner of the school lived with his family was back and behind and out of sight of any possible engraver, unless he wandered down the side street that it faced.  But it was not worth an artist's pencil--rather small and rather shabby, and fortunately out of sight of the school's front gate.  As a matter of fact, the College buildings themselves clearly to be seen only part of the year, concealed as they were behind low-hanging branches of primeval trees; an artist who wanted a little human life in his picture could have included, in among the tree trunks, the figures of young ladies in hoop skirts playing croquet.

Blurb:

This New York Times best seller by Helen Hooven Santmyer recounts the lives of a group of women who start a study club in a small town in southwestern Ohio in 1868. Over the years, the club evolves into an influential community service organization in the town. Numerous characters are introduced in the course of the novel but primary are Anne Gordon and Sally Rausch who, as the book begins, are new graduates of the Waynesboro Female Seminary. The novel covers decades of their lives—chronicling the two women’s marriages and those of their children and grandchildren. Santmyer focuses not just on the lives of the women in the club, but also their families and friends and the politics and developments in their small town and the larger world.

In this longest and most ambitious of Santmyer’s books, there is—as with all of her previous work—a poignant sense of a past made present again through an acute sensibility, of human life and experience as somehow cumulative, and of lives and events, largely fugitive and forgotten, as captured and transformed as the stuff of her poetry.

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Would you continue reading?  The beginning may not be the most 'interest-grabbing' that I've ever shared.  However, this book is one that certain readers will say is on their 'all time favorite' list or that's how they remember it.  I do know that I plan to try it again and am curious whether I'll love it has much as I did in my late 20's.  Have you read this one and what did you think if you did?