The Ugly Sister

The Ugly Sister returns to early nineteenth-century Cornwall, where Emma Spry grows up marked by a facial disfigurement, family preference and the memory of her father’s death in a duel. Her mother’s ambitions for her more conventionally attractive sister leave Emma to find a different kind of self-possession.

The novel is not part of Poldark, but it uses a related historical world of Cornish houses, social judgement, religious authority and post-Napoleonic change. Its context links therefore sit with Georgian and Regency Cornwall rather than with a specific named war or battle.