“Greeley’s storytelling is intricate, masterly, and delightfully imaginative. Highly recommended.”—Library Journal (starred review)
In this gorgeously written and spellbinding historical novel based on Pride and Prejudice, the author of The Clergyman’s Wife combines the knowing eye of Jane Austen with the eroticism and Gothic intrigue of Sarah Waters to reimagine the life of the mysterious Anne … intrigue of Sarah Waters to reimagine the life of the mysterious Anne de Bourgh.
As a fussy baby, Anne de Bourgh was prescribed laudanum to quiet her, and now the young woman must take the opium-heavy tincture every day. Growing up sheltered and confined, removed from sunshine and fresh air, the pale and overly slender Anne grew up with few companions except her cousins, including Fitzwilliam Darcy. Throughout their childhoods, it was understood that Darcy and Anne would marry and combine their vast estates of Pemberley and Rosings. But Darcy does not love Anne or want her.
After her father dies unexpectedly, leaving her his vast fortune, Anne has a moment of clarity: what if her life of fragility and illness isn’t truly real? What if she could free herself from the medicine that clouds her sharp mind and leaves her body weak and lethargic? Might there be a better life without the medicine she has been told she cannot live without?
In a frenzy of desperation, Anne discards her laudanum and flees to the London home of her cousin, Colonel John Fitzwilliam, who helps her through her painful recovery. Yet once she returns to health, new challenges await. Shy and utterly inexperienced, the wealthy heiress must forge a new identity for herself, learning to navigate a “season” in society and the complexities of love and passion. The once wan, passive Anne gives way to a braver woman with a keen edge—leading to a powerful reckoning with the domineering mother determined to control Anne’s fortune . . . and her life.
An extraordinary tale of one woman’s liberation, The Heiress reveals both the darkness and light in Austen’s world, with wit, sensuality, and a deeply compassionate understanding of the human heart.
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If Lady Catherine de Bourgh had treated her peevish baby Anne with laudanum, and kept dosing her daughter on her doctor’s advice long into her adolescence and young adulthood… Loved the depiction of Anne’s dreaming, dazed observations of the world and life in the first half of the book, and even more so how she determines to make a change in her life and works to break free of her mother’s lovingly overbearing protectiveness to create a life in London, and later back at Rosings Park, for her own.
THE HEIRESS is just stunning and made me cry at the end. A gorgeous, sensitive portrait of one of P&P’s most misunderstood and maligned characters that’s ultimately about what it means to create a life on one’s own terms. Both of Molly Greeley’s Austen-inspired novels are lyrically written treasures.
3.5 stars
The first 100 pages are very slow as a young Anne de Bourgh floats through her life under an addiction to laudanum. Once she dares flee to London, the pace picks up somewhat, but it is essentially an introspective novel of a woman full grown before she begins to experience the world beyond Rosings Park.
It took me a long time to get into the story, but it is interesting to read a story that fills a silence for a character originally created by Jane Austen in ‘Pride and Prejudice’.
Interesting, and worth a read, but not high stakes. Little conflict, but a female character who discovers a well of strength and a desire to do the right thing by her inheritance, and the people who depend on her property and management for their livelihoods.
Terribly dull. I could not finish it. Dreary.
It is easy to get a thousand prescriptions but hard to get one single remedy. ~ Chinese Proverb
Anne’s problems with the medical profession begin in the first days of her life. She is a fussy baby with a controlling mother who finds a medicine man able to stop the baby’s fusses. Opium — better than a hundred pacifiers for maintaining quiet in Rosings Park.
But, the quiet does not exist within Anne’s head.
Quote from the book: The voices of all the grown persons in my life buzzed inside my head like the whirring of insect wings, reminding me gently that I was not meant for such darting quickness.
Thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium! ~ Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Part II
Anne’s nurse is at the center of her early life: the caretaker, the teacher, the giver of drops.
Quote from the book: When the weather was fine, and the sun not too strong, Nurse sometimes took me out to the garden, where, if it was too early for my first dose, I practiced reading from the Book of Common Prayer, my tongue stumbling over sentences no more comprehensible than the whispering of the wind through the trees, and far less interesting.
The reader lives inside Anne’s head through much of the book. This author is truly a wordsmith, especially with her descriptions of Anne’s sorrow. Here is a sample:
I stood staring at it, the seed abruptly putting out strangling vines inside of me, which wrapped around my heart, squeezing until I thought it might burst.
It took all my usual disquiet and smoothed it away like the tide over the sand. It made me willing to speak of things I’d never spoken of before—my nighttime visitors; the anger that rose in me with frightening strength when I thought about my mother.
I did not answer, and we sat silently for a moment. I breathed openmouthed into my palms; I could feel my breath, warm and moist, and smell it, faintly sour with fear. The only sound in the room was the rain on the windows, an infernal, endless drumming that put me in mind of Mamma’s fingers on the arm of her chair when she was irritated.
What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains. ~ Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, 1947
At long last, Anne finds love! Anne’s life has not been ordinary and neither is the one she loves. Anne examines her relationships with various women in her life: her nurse, her childhood governess, and her cousins’ wives. She finally understands why women have been more valued in her life than men. Her path to a happy ending takes as many turns as any other heroine but she arrives.
Scenes of Anne’s life are described in detail — except for some events her mother would consider significant. For Anne, the news that her cousin has refused to marry her is practically a non-event. And when Anne makes her break for freedom, we learn of it only after it has happened.
I particularly liked the ending chapter — beautifully done.
The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself. ~ Gore Vidal
Have you ever stumbled upon a book and realized that you really needed this story? And that story is based on a side character from a beloved book? Well, here is that book for me.
There are a lot of people who don’t remember who Anne de Bourgh is in Pride and Prejudice. I will be honest I had to think about it for a moment too. She is a side character you only see maybe once twice and it’s her mother that ends up overshadowing her character in the book. This book is her life story and I loved it so much. You are never really told anything about her other than she is sicky and I think that even Austen would like this telling of her. Please do note that this is a slow-paced book from the perspective of Anne who is sometimes drugged.
For anyone who has not read Pride and Prejudice (P&P) or does not really remember Anne, she is the cousin that was promised from birth to Darcy. Neither Darcy nor Anne are supposed to have a choice in the matter because it was their mother’s wishes. So I guess we all should be thankful that it does not appear that anything formal was set up. Due to Anne’s father’s estate set up, it can be inherited by a woman which is very rare for that time. So yes the sisters were thinking about how large an estate this would pull together if their children married, and not about the happiness of those children.
In this book we follow Anne throughout her life and as sheltered as she is you really get to see her spirit as you go through this book. I loved that we get to see her take her life into her own hands and finally come into her own. Anne proves she doesn’t need a man to run her estate and I loved her for that.
We all knew from P&P that Anne’s mother Catherine was a piece of work but drugging your baby just so they wouldn’t cry and would act well behaved is a whole new low. As a mother I am appalled but I am sadly not surprised. However, at this time Laudanum was the magic fix all and they were just beginning to realize how bad it was.
I think my favorite part of this book is how Darcy and Elizabeth are brought back into Anne’s story later in life. It really warmed my heart.
I think that whether or not you are a P&P fan you would like this if you enjoy a good historical book set in Regency England.
This portrait of poor Anne de Bourgh (downtrodden daughter of the entertainingly awful Lady Catherine) is a little painful to read in the first half, since we get to watch her suffer through her laudanum-stupefied childhood. However, once she makes her escape in adulthood it moves along at a fast clip and goes into territory I certainly didn’t expect, but enjoyed. Greeley is a gifted author who slots her stories into Austen’s world of Pride and Prejudice in a very plausible way, but with a contemporary voice that is all her own. Highly recommended for liberal-minded P&P fans.
Is it failing at life if I still haven’t read a Jane Austen novel? If you read The Heiress: The Revelations of Anne de Bourgh by Molly Greeley and you haven’t read Pride and Prejudice yet you are probably going to miss out on some things. I have not read that book yet, and I think if I had I would have been able to appreciate this one more. However, by itself, The Heiress is still a lush and sometimes difficult read. Anne de Bourgh has got to be one of my favorite characters now, and I love the story Greeley created for her.
I listened to the audiobook and really loved Ell Potter’s narration. She made the prefect Anne, and really made me feel like I was a part of the story. There is nothing confusing about this novel, so I highly recommend doing audio if you like audiobooks. The Heiress is on the slow side and I did feel my attention lagging at times, but I think this is more of a “it’s not you, it’s me” situation. This was also a very serious read, and not a laugh-out-loud kind of story. I think the author must have spent considerable time researching and it was a very well-thought-out plot and story. I love historical fiction and was still able to enjoy this book without reading Pride and Prejudice. Greeley is clearly a gifted storyteller and I will be looking forward to reading more from her!
Thank you to the publisher for providing me with an advance review copy of this book, all opinions and thoughts are my own.
Anne de Bourgh, the daughter of the infamous Lady Catherine de Bourgh, is an entitled, cowed rival to the beloved Elizabeth Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice”. But is she really? Molly Greeley gives Anne a voice, a riveting story and a determination to succeed that brings her to life. Many of the paths Anne has to travel are tough to watch but with each milestone I found myself admiring her courage and tenacity more and more! She grows up right before your eyes, becoming a wonderful heroine in her own right. Thank you so much to William Morrow for providing me with an ARC of this moving and unique character study. I highly recommend it!
“I was forever waiting, without knowing quite what it was I was waiting for.” (quote from the book)
In ‘The Heiress’, Ms Greeley takes us on an intense sensory journey of Miss Anne de Bourgh’s life. Having been prescribed ‘a tincture of laudanum’ since infancy, you experience the languor, the lethargic weightiness the drug induces, and the poignancy of her childhood. Her life is sustained by the fairy tales her nurse tells her…offering visuals in her mind, hazed by her medication, as the drug takes its inevitable path to sleep.
“Memories of my early life began slow and dreamy as any of my nurse’s stories. they meander like dust motes in the shafts of sunlight that came in through the nursery window.” (quote from the book)
This is a ‘frank’, fictionalized autobiography told in Anne’s own words that has a gothic twist. Anne has a deep connection to Rosings Park and it is this, and eventually the words of her governess, that slowly give her the impetus to break free of her medication and her mother. And you experience it all…the withdrawal, the fear, finding her courage and love. Love that may be outside societal strictures of the time, but everyone needs someone to love.
“All my life, I had been dormant as a winter tree, waiting for a spring that never came.” (quote from the book)
I was mesmerized by this story as if I had been drugged and was floating along with Anne on her journey. The writing is evocative, exquisite and haunting. Again, as in her debut novel ‘The Clergyman’s Wife’, Ms. Greeley’s prose pulls forth emotions and makes you ‘feel’. It certainly did with me.
I highly recommend this novel that explores the ‘sickly’ character of Anne de Bourgh who was meant from birth to be the wife of Fitzwilliam Darcy.
To be honest, I did not know much about the book “The Heiress” by Molly Greeley prior to requesting the ARC through #netgalley. I saw this title on several lists of most anticipated historical fiction books for 2021, a genre that I dearly love. When I started reading there was something vaguely familiar about the descriptions of life in the English countryside. I was pleasantly surprised to find that this book was based on one of the lesser known characters, Anne de Bourgh, from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Avid Jane Austen fans would have picked up on references to the beloved characters and Pemberly estate much more quickly than I did. This is the story of Anne, cousin of Darcy, and future heiress to the Rosing estate. Admittedly, the first part of the story is slower paced and frustrating. Anne was very sickly as a child and the family doctor foolishly recommended she take daily doses of laudanum, a powerful sedative that kept her mostly lethargic and confined to home. Anne’s strong willed mother was in charge of her care which included a strict regimen to prevent her fragile daughter from getting overstimulated or sick. It was one of Anne’s teachers, Miss Hall, who first suggested that the “treatment” may be preventing her from experiencing life fully. Anne was supposed to marry her cousin, Darcy Fitzwilliam, when she came of age, but alas, he saw her merely as a fragile “doll” and did not love her. Anne’s mother was devastated when Darcy gave his heart to Elizabeth Bennett instead. It was not until Anne was 28 years old that she dared to see what life could be like if she stopped taking her daily drops. In a rare act of defiance, she snuck away to her cousin, Colonel John Fitzwilliam’s house in London where she went through a painful withdrawal from the drug, which ultimately led to her recovery. While her health improved, she was still fragile and unsure about stepping in society. It was her cousin John’s wife, who begrudgingly introduced her to friends and family. One of these first introductions to the spirited Eliza Amherst, would be pivotal in changing the course of Anne’s life. While this book is a tribute to Jane Austen, readers should know that this book is an original and much more brazen in treatments of topics that would be considered taboo in Jane’s day. This book questions the roles that are assigned to women and dares to question whether or not women should be free to pursue life on their own terms. Granted, it helps if women are already independently wealthy. Thank you #netgalley for the ARC. I look forward to a lively discussion when this book is released on January 5, 2021!
Pride and Prejudice fans you will devour this amazing story of the illusive Anne, the heiress of Rosings Park Kent, daughter of Sir Lewis and Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and cousin to Fitzwilliam Darcy whom she had been promised to marry since childhood. We all know what happened to that story, as Darcy ends up marrying Lizzy Bennet as he finds his HEA. This story is the life of Anne from inception to her demise, the laudanum trance that has been forced upon her as an infant to her young adult life, and her awakening as she spends a season in London and lives her life to the fullest without restraints.
The writing was exquisite and carries the same tone as Austen would write it. I am so glad to see how an obscure character got her own story in this original historical fiction I loved. Overall the story was immersive, addictive and just so amazing – historical fiction fans and Austenites will find this story a true joy. I sure did and loved it!
I want to start off by saying that I won this book in a goodreads giveaway. In return for my honest thoughts and my review. Now before I give you my thoughts I must say that I haven’t read anything by this author before. But after reading this I will be reading more from the author. Also I want to point out that I have never read pride and prejudice before either. And also added that book to my tbr shelf. I absolutely love this book. I highly recommend this book. Anne is amazing strong character who I admire great deal.
About Book:
Anne de Bourgh was born a sick baby not able to do a lot of things due to the stress that it might cause her body or her mind. Anna has been on medication since she was little. Now growing into a woman wanting to change and take control. But Anne also is different in sense is like no other woman in her time. Until she meets her governess and start to notice her feeling about women. I highly recommend this book. I don’t want to give to much away. I as a reader didn’t know to much. And I am glad that I didn’t read or know anything about this book,
Confession: I’m an avid reader who has never read Pride and Prejudice (or watched any of the movie adaptations)! However, I plan to remedy this very soon after devouring The Heiress by Molly Greeley.
This slim novel with its stunning cover (have you ever seen a bottle of laudanum look so good?) shares an imagined life for Anne de Bourgh beyond the pages of P & P. The plot includes societal and parental expectations, opium addiction, forbidden love, and many P & P characters and places.
Molly Greeley’s love of books and reading is evident throughout the second half of the novel when Anne discovers the joy of reading. Avid readers can relate to the swirl of emotions while in the midst of a powerful reading experience, and Ms. Greeley describes it beautifully in one section of The Heiress.
I’m glad I read this beautiful novel; I know it will impact my eventual P & P reading experience in wonderful ways.
This story was quite slow during the first part but increased in pace when Anne de Bourgh arrived in London. What I did enjoy was seeing Anne come into her own, making her own decisions and taking control of her life. Previously, her mother and doctor had kept her drugged on laudanum, so she was often sleepy and not fully functioning. Whilst in London, Anne discovered something about herself. I was glad that eventually she received a happy ending. I received a copy and have voluntarily reviewed it. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
The Heiress by Molly Greeley is an interesting book with a totally unexpected turn of plot. Lady Anne de Bourgh was born a cranky child. Maybe she had colic or who knows. The local doctor prescribed laudanum, which seemed to be his go-to cure for almost any ailment. The sad news here is that she remained on laudanum for almost thirty years. Her first governess had tried to tell her the damage that was being done, but she didn’t hear it until 15 years later when she heard a story about a young boy that died after his mother dosed him with the drug. This spoke to her. She dumped her bottle; got in a carriage with only her maid; and traveled to London and appeared at the door of her cousin John and his wife. The she got the drug out of her system. She was miserable for several days but thankfully the doctor John called recognized the problem and she made it through. Her mother turned up in the middle of it and was turned away. When she was finally free of its effects, she began to love. She ate and ate, started to gain weight, and started to be the social creature she was meant to be.
Anne was a strong character who was at the mercy of both a drug and her mother. Thankfully she had her cousin and some friends. The most interesting thing about her was that she had been betrothed to Fitzwilliam Darcy (Pride and Prejudice). He obviously married elsewhere and she couldn’t bring herself to care. She finally got up the gumption to take over her estate and run it. Her mother had been doing the honors since her father had dies, despite the fact she was the heiress. Her life then began to take some seriously odd turns. This was a surprise and I will not spoil it. Different and creative. Done in the style of Jane Austin. Believable within its context. It was an interesting book. I recommend it.
I was invited to read a free ARC of The Heiress by Netgalley. All opinions contained herein are solely my own. #netgalley #theheiress
Wow! This book is simply incredible! It is so moving, heartfelt, evocative, heart-rending, and has so many poignant messages. Whenever I picked up “The Heiress”, I was whisked away back to the Regency Era on the emotional journey of Anne de Bourgh.
I do not have the words to express how incredible I find Ms. Greeley’s writing! Her storytelling is spectacular, her characters all feel so real, and I could truly envision each and every moment. Taking place before, during, and after “Pride and Prejudice”, she brilliantly intertwines characters and plots from the original book with completely new storylines and characters, and I was enthralled.
(Spoilers in this Paragraph!)
I found myself pulling for Anne from the start. Since she was a baby, she has been given laudanum by a doctor…he and her family thinking that it is helping Anne’s health. However, it is truly making her very ill. After being told of someone who has also taken the drug, and what he experienced when he was away from it for the first time, Anne decides to no longer allow herself to rely on the medicine, and she decides to stop it. After an extremely difficult period, Anne comes to experience a different world than she has ever known. Her character’s growth is so beautiful to read, and my heart was so pulling for her to finally find her happiness. I absolutely love her and Eliza together, and the moment they are pulled apart absolutely broke my heart. Words can not express how emotional I was on their reunion. They bring out the best in each other, and can truly be themselves when together.
If you enjoy historical fiction and / or continuations of “Pride and Prejudice”, I highly recommend this book! I read it in under 24 hours, and was so beyond moved. I found myself immediately drawn into the story from the first page to the last. So many scenes had me in tears, some had me smiling from ear to ear…and some…well, everything in between.
Thank you so much to the author, Molly Greeley, for sending me an ARC of this book, I was incredibly moved by it, and absolutely could not put it down. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.
Please Note: This book deals with laudanum, an opium based drug, addiction, as well as symptoms of withdrawal. The author handles these with great care and respect.
As a fussy baby, Anne de Bourgh was prescribed laudanum to quieten her and has been given the opium-heavy syrup ever since, on account of her continuing ill health. While Lady Catherine is outraged when Darcy chooses not to marry her daughter, Anne barely even notices. But little by little, she comes to see that what she has always been told is an affliction of nature might in fact be one of nurture – and one, therefore, that she can beat. At the age of twenty eight she finally throws away her laudanum and seeks refuge at the London home of her cousin, Colonel Fitzwilliam.
Suddenly wide awake to the world but utterly unprepared, Anne must forge a new identity among those who have never seen the real her – including herself.
A well written slower paced book, which was well written & is a spin off of Pride & Prejudice. I did wonder how I would take to the book & I must admit I enjoyed it . The author had done her research & it showed in this captivating book. I particularly loved how Anne grew throughout the book & finally taking a stand & living away from her mother’s influence.
My honest review is for a special copy I voluntarily read
4 stars
I just finished The Heiress by Molly Greeley. The author took a minor character, Anne de Bourgh from Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice to create her story. I found it intriguing that the estate of her father, would be left to Anne as her parents did not have a male heir. When Anne was born, she cried all of the time. My guess is that she was colicky. The family doctor, Dr.Grant, prescribed laudanum. It seemed to help. The problem is that her mother and the doctor gave this to her until she was in her twenties. This went on for about 35% of the book. I almost gave up a few times as I felt I kept reading about her taking the medicine and falling to sleep. I really think the point the author was making could have been shortened. I did like the chapter where her father took her to Brighton to,see,if bathing in the waters there would help Anne. The “bathing” descriptions were hysterical.
I enjoyed the second part of the novel when Anne breaks away from her mother’s dominance and goes to London to stay with her Cousin John and his wife. She weans herself from laudanum and explores a new world of London society. A new friend, helps her explore shopping, An introduction balls and society, and much more. Something happens and Anne decides it is time for her to go home and take over managing her estate. I really liked the last part of the book as she grows in confidence in herself. The final chapter is written to perfection. This is a book worth the read….just rework the first section. I look forward to reading Greeley’s work in the future. My thanks to William Morrow and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Miss Anne de Bourgh is known only as the sedate and sickly shadow of her mother, Lady Catherine’s, condescending and loudly opinionated character. The heiress of Rosings Park in Kent, Miss de Bourgh was intended from infancy—as a favorite wish of both her mother and her aunt—to marry her first cousin, Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley in Derbyshire, thereby uniting two grand fortunes and estates. But when Mr. Darcy ultimately marries that obstinate, headstrong Miss Elizabeth Bennet instead, what is to become of Miss de Bourgh? This is one of many questions explored in Molly Greeley’s fascinating second Pride and Prejudice variation, The Heiress: The Revelations of Anne de Bourgh.
Anne de Bourgh was a wretchedly inconsolable infant. Her parents and nurse were therefore quite thankful for the medical intervention when the local doctor prescribed a dose of sleep-inducing laudanum and declared that she would always possess a delicate constitution. Consequently, Anne spends her formative years receiving twice-daily doses of her magic drops that keep her in a permanent state of lethargy. “My medicine turned me stone-heavy, a breathing statue, eyelids drawing down despite all my best efforts and thoughts drifting like milkweed fluff.” (118)
Under her mother’s formidable thumb, Anne drifts through her days in a stupor, confined to the house and gardens, wearing only what her mother selects, eating little but what her mother approves and her weak appetite allows, not permitted to dance or sing or play an instrument, and restricted from learning or reading too much. All are convinced that she is far too frail to do much of anything at all but simply exist. “If I had a shell like the snail, I thought, I would tuck myself back inside of it, away from their branding pity. I felt at once all-too-visible in my fine gowns and gaudy bonnets, and ill-defined as the edges of a ghost.” (316)
Anne is merely a detached observer of her own life, her languorous health slowly turning to vivid hallucinations. Despite her governess’s insistence that she could aspire to be so much more than what she has settled for, “if you did not stun yourself so thoroughly with your medicine” (1171), Anne continues to see herself as she has long been trained to. “Useless, I whispered inside my head, little mortified arrows that pierced my softest inner places. Useless, stupid, useless.” (1188)
Years pass by with nothing much to distinguish them from each other, until eventually the only certainties she had—her father running their estate, her expected betrothal to her cousin, and the steady support of her governess—begin to leave her, one by one. “My drops were such solace then, letting me float until at last the passage of time dampened my mother’s disappointment. I awakened to find everything exactly as it had been before, except for the tattered and singed remains of my own future.” (1286) When Anne discovers a long-overlooked letter from her former governess, will she finally have the strength to do what she must to overcome the invisible chains that bind her?
Even as a devoted fan of all things Austenesque, I have never actually read a Pride and Prejudice variation with Anne de Bourgh as the protagonist. It was refreshing to view that world from the perspective of a largely unknown secondary character. I am rarely appreciative of first-person narration, but it proved to be necessary for Anne’s story to come alive. We know the background and characters surrounding her well enough; this was Anne’s chance, as a girl imprisoned for decades in her own body, to finally tell her tale in her own words. Although I certainly pitied Anne for all that she endured, I still felt a bit like a detached observer myself, never quite developing an emotional attachment to her.
This story is told with beautifully descriptive prose that has an almost lyrical flavor at times. As Anne weaves in and out of her drug-induced awareness, the reader floats into the atmospheric depths along with her and witnesses her intense torture when she suffers from her opiate-addicted withdrawals. There were some surprisingly intimate moments that I would grant four out of five tea kettles for steam level, but they were tastefully depicted. The story’s conclusion deserves a special mention for the truly lovely and comforting picture it paints, and I also admire the colorful cover design.
The Heiress: The Revelations of Anne de Bourgh shines a beam of hazy sunlight into the dark shadows where a sheltered, unloved creature has been hiding in oppressive, cold stillness, waiting to be awakened with warmth.
4 out of 5 Regency Stars
https://austenprose.com/2021/01/04/the-heiress-the-revelations-of-anne-de-bourgh-a-pride-and-prejudice-novel-by-molly-greeley-bookreview-historicalfiction-gothicfiction-janeausten-austenesque-mollyjgreeley-wm/