When love comes to Caroline Ames Sheldon in Taylor Caldwell's "A Prologue to Love" …, it is page 553, and there are only sixty pages or so to tidy things up: change a few bequests, do a little benevolent blackmailing, engage a brain surgeon, and otherwise try to alter the course of a lifetime of bitchery.

Bitchery comes naturally to the wretched billionairess, since the father Miss Caldwell has devised for her is a marvelous nineteenth-century monster of a dad who has everything but fangs. Shut up in a rotting old country house for most of her childhood, schooled in niggardliness by her miserly parent, Caroline comes to womanly estate so terrified of poverty that she is incapable of conducting human relationships. In this block-buster of misery that blasts lives from the Franco-Prussian War to World War I, there are human relationships aplenty, most of them stemming from the fact...