A widowed matriarch reminisces about her family fortunes, including her romance with a financier/mine owner.

In this family saga, Mrs. Parkington recounts the story of her life, beginning as a hotel maid in frontier Nevada where she is swept off her feet by mine owner and financier Augustus Parkington. He moves them to New York, tries to remake her into a society woman, and establishes their home among the wealthiest of New York's high society. Family and social life is not always peaceful, however, and she guides us, in flashbacks, through the rises and falls of the Parkington family fortunes.—Eric Wees <[email protected]>

One Christmas, scandal erupts within the Parkington family, the scandal which threatens both the Parkington expansive fortune and public good name. Widowed Susie Parkington, the matriarch of the Parkington family, handles the situation always thinking about what her husband, the rough and tumble and extremely stubborn Major Gus Parkington, would have done. Susie reminisces about her life with the Major which includes: their meeting when she was living with her family in their boarding house in Leaping Frog, Nevada, where the Major owned the town's mine; her quick need to adjust to high society life in New York as Mrs. Parkington while the Major adjusted to loving a woman for the first time that he didn't want to hurt or abuse; their private battle during a public humiliation; and their estrangement following the death of their son. With thoughts of the Major deep in her mind, Susie makes a unilateral decision, one contrary to the wishes of most of the family, but one that will restore her own sense of what is means to be a Parkington in the truest sense of the Major.—Huggo