However, London society shuns her more cruelly than Sydney society. Lucinda is returning to Sydney from a year-long sojourn in London, where she had hoped to find a husband. The rich heiress owns a glassworks factory in Sydney, which her male employees will not let her enter without permission. She is shunned by society for her independent views and refusal to wear dresses with corsets. Lucinda is a feminist ahead of her time in the Victorian era. On board the ship, he meets his counterpart and fellow compulsive gambler, Lucinda Leplastrier. He decides to face his crippling fear of the water and sail to Sydney, where he intends to devote his life to dangerous missionary work in the wild badlands of Australia. How could God condemn a man for having a bit of fun at the racetrack? Locked in an inner conflict between his fears of damnation and his need to gamble, Oscar decides that a little suffering might go a long way towards redeeming him in God's eyes. Oscar justifies his vice by philosophizing that believing in God is a gamble anyway. Oscar further endangers his soul when he takes up gambling while in divinity school. He spends the rest of his life wondering if his decision has damned his soul to hell, as his father believes. He was raised by a strict, religious father, but he abandons his father's religion in favor of Anglicanism. Oscar Hopkins is a contradictory man, both pious and corrupt. Oscar and Lucinda is a satire about two star-crossed lovers that takes place in the mid-nineteenth century.
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