Paget Family Saga
1 primary work • 3 total works
Book 2
Two intertwining adventures - one of English drama and one of Indian conflict - both meet at the Paget family home in the second of Joan Aiken's romantic regency adventures, The Weeping Ash.
Aiken's earlier heroine Juliana Paget kindly lends The Hermitage Estate to her widowed cousin Thomas and his new wife Fanny - on one condition - that if their missing cousins arrive they must be welcomed in. Little does Juliana know that cousin Thomas is an abusive tyrant who torments his stoic wife, entrapping her in the beautiful Paget house.
Thousands of miles away in India, twin Paget cousins Scylla, governess to the old Maharaja's family, and her poet brother Cal are fleeing for their lives with the orphaned royal heir. They must survive a perilous journey - assisted by the dashing Colonel Cameron - across Kafiristan, Afghanistan, Persia, and Turkey before finally arriving at The Hermitage Estate.
But the adventure does not stop here. A dark and explosive confrontation awaits the Pagets as Aiken's two spirited heroines strive for independence in this thrilling romantic adventure.
Strong, subversive heroine Juliana Paget is forced to flee from her Italian home during the French Revolution in the first of Joan Aiken's romantic regency adventures, The Smile of a Stranger.
Escaping from the horrors of revolutionary France, seventeen year old Juliana embarks on a wild and dangerous journey, crossing the channel in a hot air balloon to the supposed safety of English soil. But what awaits her is far from harmless: an evil aunt, a dangerous prospective husband, and a threatening presence from her past . . .
Aiken's plucky but disarmingly innocent heroine must learn to tell truth from fiction in this gripping romantic adventure.
An elegant Victorian young lady educated at a familiar sounding boarding school in Brussels (think Charlotte Bronte's Villette) and now A Girl From Paris, Ellen Paget is on a (never ending) journey of romantic adventure - often attracting the wrong kind of admiration - in the third and final of Joan Aiken's regency dramas.
Twenty-one-year old Ellen is an intelligent and spirited heroine, whisked away from her teaching profession and unsuitable romance in Brussels by her godmother to become a governess in the household of a grand Parisian Comte.
But as the Count's family tensions and their literary salon scene (think George Sand and Baudelaire) are reaching sinister heights, Ellen finds gothic entanglements in the schemes of her brutal father back home in The Hermitage. She must now extract herself from all these ties and discover who her true friends are, in order to find her own happiness.
Joan Aiken plunges into the hearts of two contrasting families in this dark and romantic adventure.