Lucinda Brayford

Lucinda Brayford is a novel by the Australian author Martin Boyd, published in 1946. It tells the story of a beautiful woman and is set mainly in Melbourne and England.

Lucinda Vane is born into a wealthy Melbourne family. At a garden party given by her mother, Nellie Melba sings, and Lucinda grows up inside a world of comfort and expectation that the book describes in detail. The garden party is one of the occasions on which the novel shows what Melbourne society thought of itself.

She spurns the love of a distinguished family friend, Tony Duff, in order to marry Hugo Brayford, the dashing aide-de-camp to the Governor. When Hugo takes her to England shortly before the First World War, her life of ease is replaced by hardship.

In England she works out that her husband married her for her money and that he has a mistress, and the novel follows her from the early 1900s to the Second World War as both the family she joined and the family she came from change around her.