The Orange Tree Plot

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

First published 1989

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2.5(5)

Eugenie, the cherished daughter of the Comte de Talcy, grows up within the privilege and ritual of France's Ancien Régime. In 1789 that secure world collapses as revolution reaches Paris and aristocratic birth becomes a source of mortal danger. After her father's death, nineteen-year-old Eugenie is forced to flee the society in which she expected to spend her life.

Her struggle for survival carries the novel through the upheaval of the French Revolution, where loyalties, identities and social ranks can change almost overnight. Harrod-Eagles combines romance and adventure with the disintegration of the old political order, using Eugenie's displacement to show how revolutionary violence turned private family histories into questions of citizenship, class and survival.