Treason’s Daughter

London, 1640. Fifteen-year-old Henrietta Challoner is the highly educated daughter of a prosperous merchant, but the freedoms she wants are restricted by expectations about gender and family. As confrontation between Charles I and Parliament turns into civil war, the Challoners divide politically: one brother moves towards the Parliamentarian cause while another and their father are drawn towards the King, placing Henrietta between loyalties she cannot reconcile.

The novel follows the family across the long disruption of the 1640s, including fighting, religious radicalisation and a Royalist conspiracy inside Parliament-held London. Henrietta and the Challoners are fictional, but their choices are embedded in the documented political and military crises of the English Civil War. Senior uses Henrietta’s coming of age to show how national conflict could break ordinary households into rival political and religious camps.