The Vision of Desire

A woman with a scandal behind her and a man with an inheritance he cannot touch meet in a country house where everyone is watching. Pedler was a trained musician who turned out thirty romances between the wars, and knew exactly what her readers wanted: a heroine with a past, a hero with a temper, and the English weather doing the emotional work. Fifty-seven plates of paintings from 1791 to 1928, among them John Lavery and Edvard Munch, gather the exhibition halls, card tables and naval squadrons of the era this story inhabits.