"Ellen Gilchrist's debut novel expands the thematic and visual landscapes the author made indelibly hers in radiantly spun stories. The Annunciation follows the desires of Amanda McCamey: an unwed mother on a Mississippi Delta plantation at age fourteen, a wealthy New Orleans matron until her early forties, and now a divorced poetry student living in a university community in the Ozarks.

When Amanda finds herself infatuated with an intense young musician, what at first appears to be a sexual intrigue becomes a grand and impossible passion that unfolds with striking parallels to the life of the eighteenth-century French poetess whose work she is translating."--BOOK JACKET.