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THE 30TH ANNIVERSARY
EDITION
With new foreword by the author.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Harper
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London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Viking 1987
This edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017
Copyright © Philippa Gregory Ltd 1987
Map copyright © www.old-maps.co.uk and Ordnance Survey
Cover design by Ward/MacDonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 2017
Cover image © Archivist 2015/Alamy
Philippa Gregory asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008229986
Ebook Edition © APRIL 2017 ISBN: 9780007383368
Version: 2017-04-25
Contents
Philippa Gregory’s Wideacre trilogy continues with The Favoured Child and Meridon
Discover More of Philippa Gregory’s Tudor Novels
I was a young married woman, in my late twenties, living in a small town in the North of England. I had a newborn daughter and I was trying to finish my PhD thesis on the popular fiction of the eighteenth century. To prepare for this study I had read more than 200 novels published between 1740 and 1800 and had painstakingly compared the standard elements like sexual morality, the relationship to agriculture and the countryside, and the wonderfully bizarre: incest, banditti, even aliens. I believed there were identifiable themes in the novels and that they could be read together as a fictional world that sometimes mirrored eighteenth-century England, and sometimes denied and hid it.
Hoping to become an expert in the real and imaginary eighteenth-century world, I accidentally served the ideal author’s apprenticeship. Without intending it – for