A Lady of Quality

Clorinda Wildairs is raised as a boy by a drunken squire, turns at fifteen into the handsomest woman in the county, and marries a rich old earl — and then a man from her riding years comes back to say what he knows. Burnett wrote it for adults in 1896, and the book was a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic for a violence at its centre that nobody had expected from her. What follows the violence is not remorse but management. Fifty-nine plates after Gainsborough, Stubbs, Romney and their contemporaries bring the fields, hounds and country faces of Clorinda's riding years into the book.