The Marriage Season and Pride and Prejudice
Sybella & Lucie Lovatt are two country sisters like Jane and Elizabeth Bennett, who are introduced to the Beau Monde and without losing their unspoiled natures and individual spirit find enduring love (and a fine country estate each to rival Pemberley)
An Unsuitable Heiress and Mansfield Park
The heroine Corinna Ormesby is dispossessed and an orphan; she believes brought up by an uncongenial distant family. But with courage, she decides to make her solitary way in the world, meets a number of sparky young men, and ends up with the best of the company of friends. Fanny Price has been described as “a displaced child with an unshakeable conscience. A true heroine”. Corinna is just as displaced and just as clear-sighted and generous, just as much a heroine.
The enchanting match-maker in Scandalous Match is an eleven-year-old child, Elinor Asprey, who is determined that her beloved widowed father, Ivor, will marry the beautiful actress Angelica Leigh, not Lady Linus, the cold fish aristocrat, better suited to him socially. As with Emma, there are other love affairs, all kinds of misunderstandings, passionate comings together and parting. But the right outcome for everyone is achieved at last.
A Lady’s Fortune and Persuasion
A spinster at 27, Leonora Appleby thought her chance of love was gone with the death of her fiancé in the Napoleonic Wars. Like Anne Eliott, her pleasure and usefulness are in making others in her village happy, not least her adopted sister, Charlotte Blythe. But back from the wars comes a wounded hero, Earl Rokeby, and his wolfhound, and life for Leonora begins again.
The Accidental Debutante and Sense & Sensibility
Eliza Gray, lost on the streets of Bath at the age of 7 and taken in by the circus, lives her life, like Marianne Dashwood, by the precepts of high romance and idealised love. She escapes the circus to search for her family and follow the promptings of her heart: her best friend Marina Fairley, like Elinor Dashwood, is a woman who believes in reason in all things and attempts to eschew drama and emotion. They both modify each other’s fundamentalism but, with many reversals, Eliza Gray – and her desire for love above all -triumphs.
