Book
The Broad Highway
First published 1910
Peter Vibart emerges from the reading of his uncle’s will with only ten guineas and a condition he refuses to satisfy: a fortune awaits whichever of two cousins marries Lady Sophia Sefton within a year. Rather than make marriage a bargain, Peter takes to the roads and byways of Kent, where highwaymen, pugilists, soldiers, tinkers and country inns replace the protected world he has left behind. His decision to earn his own living leads him to work as a village blacksmith and brings him into the orbit of the mysterious Charmian.
Farnol turns the Regency road into a testing ground for class, independence and personal honour. Peter’s encounters with working people and men outside respectable society repeatedly challenge inherited ideas of gentility, while the romance with Charmian develops amid pursuit and danger. The novel establishes the Vibart family story continued many years later in Charmian, Lady Vibart and The Way Beyond.
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