Back cover blurb:
"Before she saw him or spoke to him, she had determined to love him, as if she were a governess in a book. Meeting him had merely confirmed her intention, made possible what she had hoped."
Young Cassandra is alone in the world, her father has just died. When she goes to Cropthorne Manor as a governess, its weary facade and crumbling statues are all that she could hope for. And Marion Vanbrugh is the perfect employer -- a widower, austere and distant, with a penchant for Greek. But this is not a nineteenth-century novel and Cassandra's Mr Rochester isn't the only inhabitant of the manor. There's Tom, irascible and discontented, Margaret, pregnant and voracious, the ineffectual Tinty and the eccentric, domineering Nanny. Just as Jane Austen wittily contrasted real life with a girl's Gothic fantasies in "Northanger Abbey", so Elizabeth Taylor examines the realities of life for a latter-day Jane Eyre in this sharply observed work, first published in 1946.
"Before she saw him or spoke to him, she had determined to love him, as if she were a governess in a book. Meeting him had merely confirmed her intention, made possible what she had hoped."
Young Cassandra is alone in the world, her father has just died. When she goes to Cropthorne Manor as a governess, its weary facade and crumbling statues are all that she could hope for. And Marion Vanbrugh is the perfect employer -- a widower, austere and distant, with a penchant for Greek. But this is not a nineteenth-century novel and Cassandra's Mr Rochester isn't the only inhabitant of the manor. There's Tom, irascible and discontented, Margaret, pregnant and voracious, the ineffectual Tinty and the eccentric, domineering Nanny. Just as Jane Austen wittily contrasted real life with a girl's Gothic fantasies in "Northanger Abbey", so Elizabeth Taylor examines the realities of life for a latter-day Jane Eyre in this sharply observed work, first published in 1946.
