Cordelia

Cordelia is set in Manchester in 1867, where a young woman enters the Ferguson family through marriage and finds herself inside a household shaped by money, grief, control and suspicion. Brook Ferguson’s earlier bereavement and his father’s dominance make the marriage less a refuge than another contest over power.

The novel uses a Victorian industrial setting rather than the Cornish world of Poldark. Its historical interest lies in the pressures placed on women, property and respectability in a manufacturing city, where family authority and commercial wealth can be as confining as poverty.