Consider the Lily

Name: Consider the Lily
Rating: 4.1 (597 reviews)

by Elizabeth Buchan

First published 1993

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4.1(597)

Summer 1929. The Hinton Dysart estate is in financial decline, and its heir Kit Dysart sees marriage to wealth as one of the few ways to protect the family home. He falls in love with Daisy Chudleigh but instead marries her wealthy cousin Matty Verrall, setting in motion a painful triangle in which affection, duty and class obligation pull in different directions.

As Matty tries to create a life inside an unhappy marriage, the restoration of Hinton Dysart’s neglected garden gives her an unexpected source of purpose and independence. Buchan places the emotional drama within the economic and social pressures affecting English country-house society between the wars, making the estate itself a measure of changing wealth, inheritance and women’s expectations.