Still She Wished for Company by Margaret Irwin

In exile Lucian had reached out for everything life had to offer, and it had left him jaded and bored. Lucian was wicked, he was dissipated, and his father thrown him our and to barred him from the house and from contact with his family, and denounce him from his deathbed. Life does change for Juliana when her father dies and her eldest brother, Lucian, returned from a long sojourn abroad, to take his father’s title, his father’s estate, and her father’s position as head of the family. Two charming young ladies, quite alike, and certainly both rather inclined to daydream She tried to fill the long hours, busying herself in the house and the garden, writing in her journal, but she longed for something to happen, and she knew that something wasn’t marriage to one of the eligible young men that her mother thought were so suitable. She liked her life, but she was beginning to find her office job, and the eligible young man who was courting her, just a little bit dull.Ī century and a half earlier, Juliana Clare, the youngest daughter of an aristocratic Berkshire family, was finding life a little dull too. Jan Challard was a modern – but not too modern – young woman who lived and worked in 1920s.

‘Still She Wished for Company was published in 1924, and it moves between that era and the 1770s, and between two lovely heroines.

I had always thought of Margaret Irwin as a writer of historical fiction, but when I spotted this book I realised that it was a little different, and I was to discover that she had spun a very different, slightly magical, slightly ghostly, story around a story set back in history.

Still She Wished for Company by Margaret Irwin