Complete and unabridged, with 57 full-page plates by Thomas Cole, John Constable and J. M. W. Turner. Lady Ursula Lea writes down the family history at her brothers' and sisters' request: how a handsome stranger brought up in a Montreal convent arrived at Trevorsham claiming to be the daughter of her father's first, secret marriage, how the peerage case went against them, and what the claim cost the family she had grown up in. Yonge tells it through a proud girl who is honest about her own ill-temper, and the neighbourhood's delight in the romantic claimant is observed without mercy. She lived her whole life in one Hampshire village and taught Sunday school there for seventy-one years. Fifty-seven plates by painters including Richard Redgrave and William Powell Frith, spanning 1745 to 1907, gather scenes of English domestic life and romantic incident that answer to the novel's own world of family claim and village judgment.
