Hutchinson followed the success of If Winter Comes with This Freedom. Like If Winter Comes, it is an intensely serious novel and manifests rather conservative views. Unlike the former novel, however, This Freedom creates issues more convincingly than characters. The novel deals with a married couple, Rosalie and Harry Occleve, and their children, Hugh, Dora, and Benji. Her early life has led Rosalie to believe that she cannot be happy without a "man's" career, so she works passionately in business, leaving her children to care for themselves, which they do with results made predictable by the thesis of the novel. The eldest son, forced into a loveless marriage with a lower-class girl, is finally jailed for embezzlement; the daughter dies on an abortionist's table; the younger son kills himself. All of these disasters happen within days of each other: Hutchinson builds his background so that the...