Articulate and intelligent, Augusta Peabody avoids Society's censure by secretly publishing her political essays under the pen name "Firebrand." But despite all outward efforts to behave like a proper lady, she's set off the Earl of Dunham with her latest article decrying the use of child labor in the northern coal mines. Bored with life as a rake, Dunham decides to take up Firebrand's cause, never dreaming that the reclusive writer is the headstrong young lady with whom he's constantly clashing. When the truth comes out, Augusta reluctantly allows Dunham to help her investigate the gentleman she suspects is kidnapping children, and accidentally ignites new passions that could destroy them both if their cunning enemy has his way. REVIEWS: "...cleverly plotted tale with sparkling wit and irresistible romance." ~RT magazine SCANDALOUS SECRETS SERIES, in order The Banished Bride Lady of Letters The Major's Mistake LESSONS IN LOVE, in series order The Defiant Governess Second Chances The Storybook Hero

A drunken laugh, a roll of the dice... and Aurora Sprague finds herself a child bride, married in haste to a young man she's never met to settle her father's gaming debt. Moments after the ceremony, the new groom gallops off to the army and Aurora is banished to a remote estate, married in name only. Years later, Alex Fenimore, now a top intelligence officer, is on a secret mission when a fiery young lady helps him escape attack. He has no idea that the woman is his wife or that the sparks of desire between them are about to ignite a dangerous passion. AWARDS: Best Regency of the Year Nominee, 2000 REVIEWS: "...lush romance mixed with great humor and a touch of human frailty." ~RT magazine SCANDALOUS SECRETS SERIES, in order The Banished Bride Lady of Letters The Major's Mistake LESSONS IN LOVE, in series order The Defiant Governess Second Chances The Storybook Hero

Emily "Fido" Faithfull, a spinster pioneer in the British women's movement, is distracted from her cause by the details of her friend's failing marriage and affair with a young army officer, in this drama of friends, lovers, and divorce, Victorian style.

'Jane Austen practising' Virginia Woolf Three notebooks of Jane Austen's teenage writings survive. The earliest pieces probably date from 1786 or 1787, around the time that Jane, aged 11 or 12, and her older sister and collaborator Cassandra left school. By this point Austen was already an indiscriminate and precocious reader, devouring pulp fiction and classic literature alike; what she read, she soon began to imitate and parody. Unlike many teenage writings then and now, these are not secret or agonized confessions entrusted to a private journal and for the writer's eyes alone. Rather, they are stories to be shared and admired by a named audience of family and friends. Devices and themes which appear subtly in Austen's later fiction run riot openly and exuberantly across the teenage page. Drunkenness, brawling, sexual misdemeanour, theft, and even murder prevail.

Winner of the Christian Gauss Award for excellence in literary scholarship from the Phi Beta Kappa Society Having excavated the world's earliest novels in his previous book, literary historian Steven Moore explores in this sequel the remarkable flowering of the novel between the years 1600 and 1800-from Don Quixote to America's first big novel, an homage to Cervantes entitled Modern Chivalry. This is the period of such classic novels as Tom Jones, Candide, and Dangerous Liaisons, but beyond the dozen or so recognized classics there are hundreds of other interesting novels that appeared then, known only to specialists: Spanish picaresques, French heroic romances, massive Chinese novels, Japanese graphic novels, eccentric English novels, and the earliest American novels. These minor novels are not only interesting in their own right, but also provide the context needed to appreciate why the major novels were major breakthroughs. The novel experienced an explosive growth spurt during these centuries as novelists experimented with different forms and genres: epistolary novels, romances, Gothic thrillers, novels in verse, parodies, science fiction, episodic road trips, and family sagas, along with quirky, unclassifiable experiments in fiction that resemble contemporary, avant-garde works. As in his previous volume, Moore privileges the innovators and outriders, those who kept the novel novel. In the most comprehensive history of this period ever written, Moore examines over 400 novels from around the world in a lively style that is as entertaining as it is informative. Though written for a general audience, The Novel, An Alternative History also provides the scholarly apparatus required by the serious student of the period. This sequel, like its predecessor, is a “zestfully encyclopedic, avidly opinionated, and dazzlingly fresh history of the most 'elastic' of literary forms” (Booklist).

AN INSTANT #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "No one does suburban paranoia like Shari Lapena." —Ruth Ware, internationally bestselling author of The Woman in Cabin 10 Maybe you don't know your neighbours as well as you thought you did . . . In a quiet, leafy suburb in upstate New York, a teenager has been sneaking into houses—and into the owners' computers as well—learning their secrets, and maybe sharing some of them, too. Who is he, and what might he have uncovered? After two anonymous letters are received, whispers start to circulate, and suspicion mounts. And when a woman down the street is found murdered, the tension reaches the breaking point. Who killed her? Who knows more than they're telling? And how far will all these very nice people go to protect their own secrets? In this neighbourhood, it's not just the husbands and wives who play games. Here, everyone in the family has something to hide. You never really know what people are capable of . . .

On 15 October 1838, the body of a thirty-six-year-old woman was found in Cape Coast Castle, West Africa, a bottle of Prussic acid in her hand. She was one of the most famous English poets of her day: Letitia Elizabeth Landon, known by her initials 'L.E.L.' What was she doing in Africa? Was her death an accident, as the inquest claimed? Or had she committed suicide, or even been murdered? To her contemporaries, she was an icon, hailed as the 'female Byron', admired by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Heinrich Heine, the young Bronte sisters and Edgar Allan Poe. However, she was also a woman with secrets, the mother of three illegitimate children whose existence was subsequently wiped from the record. After her death, she became the subject of a cover-up which is only now unravelling. Too scandalous for her reputation to survive, Letitia Landon was a brilliant woman who made a Faustian pact in a ruthless world. She embodied the post-Byronic era, the 'strange pause' between the Romantics and the Victorians. This new investigation into the mystery of her life, work and death excavates a whole lost literary culture.