Maulever Hall

Maulever Hall must be the first "gothic" ... "regency" I ever read and I was in junior high school at the time. A very early effort by this author who has had a long and prolific career. I remember it fondly as a precursor, for me at any rate, to my foray into Georgette Heyer and, as such, it has always remained a standard by which to judge much regency and historical fiction. Briefly, it is the story of young Marianne, victim of amnesia who arrives at Maulever Hall with a small boy in tow not knowing who she is or where she was bound or, indeed, who the small boy is. The owner of the Hall, Mr Mark Mauleverer, is a forbidding (never sinister - indeed, he's too sexy to be that and at 13 or 14 when I first read this, I was MOST impressed!!) character, a politician and former soldier, a battle-scarred veteran of Waterloo. There is a mystery, of course, which gets solved but also allows the H/H to be developed, fleshed out and fall in love. There are peripheral characters comically drawn including the hero's mother and a duchess who gardens in gum-boots.Worth seeking out if only to see how few authors writing in this genre today have managed to achieve Jane Aiken Hodge's early standards! I simply cannot believe my copy is a 1967 edition!!!