Publication date: November 10th, 2020
Synopsis:
Pitchforked into the title by his brother's death, the new Lord Newsam arrives at the grim family home in Yorkshire to face daunting challenges. His peevish, self-absorbed mother despises him. The servants are insubordinate. He hardly knows his sisters, for whom he's expected to find husbands. The estate is ill-run and unprofitable, and the bailiff obstructive. And in the midst of all this, he must find a wife for himself -- but the only woman he wants won't have him.
To widowed, impoverished Mary Thorpe, the very name of Newsam is detestable: his brother drove her husband to suicide and made her a social outcast. But Lord Newsam insists on rescuing her from penury. The shocking realization that she is falling in love with him in spite of herself makes her situation even more complicated. How can she let him ruin his own family's reputation by marrying her? There seems to be no solution -- until every objection is swept away by a ball nobody wants to attest and a startling discovery on their return.
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Guest Post
One of the wonderful things about living in the U.K. is the closeness to history. Growing up in a small U.S. town, I lived in an odd house which was half of what had once been a big school. It was over a hundred years old, with thick stone walls and deep windowsills, and nonfunctional pipes for gaslights which the paperhanger had nearly wrapped wallpaper around. We thought it was practically ancient! Then I moved to England. There are stately homes all over, open to the public; Norman forts dating back seven or eight centuries; Roman roads you can walk on and Roman villas with tesselated floors; ancient Celtic hill-forts... I could go on, but you get the idea. History -- REAL history -- so easily accessible! I still can't get over it.
When I considered writing Regencies, I decided to avoid London (I hate cities) and Bath. I live in Manchester, in the North, near the Yorkshire Moors, full of literary associations. Frances Hodgson Burnett lived, as a child, a twenty-minute walk from my home. Mrs. Gaskell's house is a bus ride away. Harrogate, the Bath of the North, is only a short train ride into Yorkshire, with Buxton, another spa in Derbyshire, equally close. Haworth (with tourist signs in Japanese) is easy to get to. Knutsford, the original of "Cranford", isn't far from my optometrist. We have a superb Museum of Costume, an excellent university library, and, best of all, the nation is full of historical re-enactment societies -- favorite eras being Napoleonic and Viking/Norman/Saxon. Well, with all these resources, wouldn't it have been a waste not to take advantage of them?
Although she now lives in the U.K., Arabella Brown grew up in a small U.S. town. She spent most of her youth in the local Carnegie Public Library (thank you, Mr. Carnegie!), where she learned that intensive reading does more to broaden your horizons than school does. She still reads voraciously and her house is lined with thousands of books. Despite her emphasis on meticulous research, it's the plot and the characters she particularly loves to create. She enjoys Jane Austen's and Georgette Heyer's novels and wishes there were more of them.
Under another name, Ms. Brown has published a number of novels set in periods ranging from 12th century to the 1960's. This is her first Regency.
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