Stormfire

Stormfire is a historical romance by the American writer Christine Monson, published in 1984. It is set between England and Ireland.

Catherine Enderly is sixteen years old and travelling to boarding school when she is abducted and taken from England to the coast of Ireland, where she becomes the prisoner of Sean Culhane, a young and powerful man who is sworn to take vengeance on her family. Frightened but defiant, she meets her captor with a strength that belies her fragile appearance, and Sean finds as the weeks go on that his intention to take his revenge is competing with what he has begun to feel for her. The novel follows the two of them through a relationship built on hostility as much as on attraction, and it is one of the long historical romances of the decade, running to more than five hundred pages.

The book belongs to a period of the genre in which the conflict between captor and captive was a standard frame, and it sets that frame inside the political hostility between England and Ireland. The oath of vengeance against her family is the reason Catherine is in Ireland at all, and it is the thing the novel has to resolve.