Overview

The Talbots are wealthy. But their wealth is from 'trade'. With neither ancient lineage nor title, they struggle for entrance into elite Regency society. Finally, aided by an impecunious viscount, they gain access to the drawing rooms of England's most illustrious houses. Mrs Talbot intends her daughter Jocelyn to marry well, to eliminate the stain of the family's ignoble beginnings. But the young men Jocelyn meets are vacuous, seeing Jocelyn as merely a substantial dowry. Only Lieutenant Barnaby Willow sees the real Jocelyn, but he is deployed to war. The hypocrisy of fashionable society repulses Jocelyn-beneath the courtly manners she finds deceit, dissipation and vice. She stumbles upon and then is embroiled in a sordid scandal which threatens utter disgrace for the Talbot family. Humiliated and dishonoured, she is sent to a remote house hidden in a hollow of the Yorkshire moors, irrevocably separated from family, friends and any hope of hearing about the lieutenant's fate. Jocelyn's incarceration in the mysterious old mansion forces her to reassess her values - and the values of the society she was so anxious to be part of.

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9781916072060

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I couldn't put this book down - for me, it is Cresswell's best yet. I was seduced by this story from the very beginning, thanks to the calibre of Allie Cresswell's exquisite prose, which is almost poetic in its quality. I could feel the bitter cold. I shivered with trepidation at Jocelyn's plight and rejoiced in her small triumphs. This is easily one of the best books I've read this year. Allie Cresswell once more demonstrates her almost peerless ability to evoke place and period. I admired her exploration of class, privilege and gender in the early part of the nineteenth century - a politicised Jane Austen. For lovers of historical fiction, I think Cresswell is up there with the best of them.

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