Loving and Giving

Loving and Giving is a romance by the English writer Denise Robins, published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1965. Its title comes from the old rhyme about the days of the week, and the phrase gives the book its theme as well as its name.

Juliet has given her working life to the care of crippled and deprived children. When she leaves London for a post in the south of France, the phrase takes on a deeper meaning, because her new life brings her more love and more pain than she had allowed for.

She falls in love with Lucien de Maureville, a gentle man whose wife has been unfaithful to him and who is caught between what he feels for Juliet and the loyalty his marriage still claims. Juliet has always regarded love as a sacred bond and marriage as an oath she would never break, and she promised herself that she would never love a married man, which is precisely what she has now done, and the novel works through what she intends to do about it.