Willowwoo

Will Lilian ever find the love she desires…?

Lilian de Wentworth is twenty years old, Victorian, beautiful and trapped.

A fall from her pony in childhood has meant near-total confinement to her rooms at the Dower House, Scarbrick Park, Yorkshire ever since, to become — at least to her mother’s mind — the embodiment of the enchanted princess from the poetical works of Alfred Tennyson.

But if sleeping princess she be, then she is awakened from her trance at the local village cricket match, when love at first sight springs up between herself and Jack Ellershaw, an under-gardener on her uncle’s estate.

But scandal ensues from their meeting and Lilian is sent to London, on an extended visit to her eccentric Aunt Frederica, admirer of the sensational, visionary Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

She is quickly caught up in their heady, languorous world. Presenting, as she does, the perfect appearance of a Pre-Raphaelite woman — red hair, pale complexion, languid limbs — she is persuaded by the suave Leoline Bevis to act as artist’s model.

Soon it seems as if the natural delights of Yorkshire — and Jack — have faded from Lilian’s mind, as she falls deeper and deeper into the trap of Bevis’s lethal glamour…

Can she ever find her way back to happiness…?