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Brenda Jagger

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Ludmilla
Bibliophile
Posts: 1346
Joined: September 2008
Location: Georgia USA

Brenda Jagger

Post by Ludmilla » Mon July 27th, 2015, 6:58 pm

I thought I’d start an author thread for Brenda Jagger who seems to have fallen into obscurity. I’ve been reading what I can find of her wonderful historicals. So far, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed Days of Grace (probably my favorite so far), A Winter’s Child and A Song Twice Over. I’ve just started the first book in the Barforth trilogy. Below are plot summaries and biographical data that I found on Fantastic Fiction (or in a few cases, if the plot summary was missing from FF, I took it from GoodReads). These are worth looking for if you can find them!

About the author
Brenda Jagger was born on 1936 in Yorkshire, England, UK, which was the setting for many of her books including her famous Barforth family saga. The recurring central themes of her work are marriage, womanhood, class, identity, and money in the Victorian Era. Her work has been praised for its compelling plots and moving storylines as well as its exacting emotional descriptions. Her later novel A Song Twice Over won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award in 1986. She died in 1986.

Bibliography

Barforth series
The Clouded Hills (1980) (US Title: Verity)
At sixteen Verity becomes sole heiress to a fortune founded on the wool mills of Yorkshire and realizes for the first time that she is no more than a pawn in the games of ambitious men. Obedient to the conventions of the Victorian age, she accepts a marriage of convenience and cloaks her proud spirit in the silks and satins of a society hostess. But for Verity Barforth convention is not enough. When at last she falls in love it is not with her husband, and she becomes the centre of a powerful drama of infidelity, jealousy and revenge, played out against the magnificent landscapes of the Yorkshire moors and the brutal poverty of the mills.

Flint and Roses (1981) (US Title: The Barforth Women)
The second novel in the Barforth trilogy, set in Yorkshire in the mid-19th century. The Barforths, wool-manufacturers and mill-owners, are in conflict with the old landed gentry. Their lives, full of love, hatred and struggle, interweave with Faith Aycliffe's adventurous spirit.

The Sleeping Sword (1982) (US Title: An Independent Woman)
Grace Agbrigg has ambitions beyond merely ornamenting the home of a rich husband. But high Victorian England is still almost wholly a man's world in which women - rich or poor - must do the bidding of father, husband or employer.Attracted against her will to the ambitious and ruthless Gideon Chard, Grace instead makes the marriage that is expected of her. But eventually she breaks free of a relationship that is a sham to become the only divorcée in Cullingford - and a social outcast.Set against a background of change and unrest, of dazzling wealth cheek by jowl with bitter poverty, The Sleeping Sword, which concludes the magnificent Barforth saga, is an unforgettable portrait of an age as well as a compelling story of love between two strong and determined people.


Other Novels:
Daughter of Aphrodite (1981) (I actually found two dates for this one: 1978 and 1981, not sure which is correct)
A courtesan in love with a charioteer must take on wealthier lovers to make a living.

Days of Grace (1983)
Olivia Heron's vagrant Parisian childhood ended on the day her brother died. Now, as heiress to Clarrow Fell, Olivia brings her delightful, frivolous mother and her sisters home to Yorkshire - and to a different world. The elegant salons, the shabby lodgings, are replaced by the grim and alien grandeur of the moors and the mill towns. Olivia will inherit the land and the traditions she has come to love. But first she must check the ambitions of her wealthy cousin Max. Charming, sophisticated and ruthless, Max makes no secret of his desire to be master of Clarrow Fell - and of Olivia too . . . This books spans the years between Victoria’s death and the beginning of WW1.

A Winter's Child (1984)
The [Great] war was over, and Jeremy Swanfield's family were eager to include his young widow in their prosperous, comfortable life. But between the demure bride, who had waved her husband of three days to the front, and the woman with three years of nursing behind her, lay an impassable gulf of experience. Claire Swanfield was fiercely determined to maintain her independence in the post-war world. Taking a job in the smart new hotel run by Kit Hardie - once the Swanfield's boot-boy, now part of the new elite - was the first of many acts that would bring her into conflict with her husband's family - especially the coolly conventional Benedict.

Antonia (1984)
Nero had been dead for six months and Rome was a changed city. His butterfly world had vanished before a bookkeeping emperor in his seventies, and Rome would have to wait for Galba's death before the glamorous people could return. In one respect, however, Roman life would never change. An heiress who could combine the noblest breeding with impressive wealth was always an important political pawn and Antonia's ancestry and assets were the most impeccable in Rome. Antonia was twenty and had already been tactically betrothed four times when Piso was presented to her as her future husband. Piso, the returned exile with his way to make, was correct and passionless and perhaps the next emperor. There was also Ortho with his charm and his flair for living and his elegant friends - very much the sort of man girls like Antonia were warned against. While in Germany the legions were restive, and Vespasian waited in Judea, nothing in the political arena had any certainty; while Rome, like a courtesan, bowed to the possessor of the moment.

A Song Twice over (1985)
At the height of the Industrial Revolution, two women struggle to break free of the conventions that bind them. Cara, poor and beautiful, dreams of evading the menacing shadow of the workhouse, of becoming both financially independent and free of her protector, the ruthless Captain Christie. Gemma, daughter of Victorian luxury, marries to oblige her family and struggles to escape the smothering constraints of 'good' society, where a woman is valued purely for her charm and her childbearing. And both women, from very different backgrounds, find the political idealist and man of fortune Daniel Carey, irresistible . . .

Distant Choices (1986)
In a world of mill barons and railway kings, two sisters Oriel and Kate share the same uncaring father. But whereas Kate is legitimate, Oriel is not. Oriel learns from an ambitious mother to be cool, to calm the fire in her heart. Kate, with emotions untamed and no mother at all, yearns to break free from her loveless life. Drawn together by fate as well as birth, the two sisters are friends. And then squire Francis Ashington, poet and explorer, comes back to live in the Gore Valley . . .

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