The Lost Bride

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. In this reflective first-person novel, a woman looks back on a life shaped by love, loss, and the uneasy claims of inheritance. Raised in southern Italy by an English Protestant father and a distant mother, she is devastated by her father's death at fourteen and clings to her romantic devotion to her cousin Carlo Spinola, whose return briefly restores her happiness before her guardian, Mr. Mordaunt, sends her away. In Paris, two years at a convent replace childhood freedom with discipline, yet secret letters to Carlo keep her hopes alive. Summoned to England, she reaches Langdale Priory, the ancestral home she has known only through stories, and feels its gardens and rooms as living traces of her father. There, Aunt Jane reveals a dark family history of gambling, disappearance, possible death, and rumors of a hidden heir, while the narrator grows increasingly suspicious of Mordaunt's motives and doubtful of Carlo's future. Friendship with the gentle Norah offers brief comfort, but loss soon hardens into pride and ambition. When London society beckons, Lady Horatia Somerton and her daughter Letitia fashion her debut, preparing her for a glittering ball where beauty, scrutiny, and the pressure to become her father's daughter collide with the lingering ache of her Italian past.