The Lost Garden

The Lost Garden is a historical romance by Jane Aiken Hodge, published in 1982. Its heroine, Caroline Thorpe, is not a great beauty but is described as a real little charmer.

She is summoned to the home of the Duke of Cley, and what she finds there is a strange household in a house that is not a happy one. She is also told, in as many words, that the duke's daughters do not intend to be sisters to her. The duke's own household is not in good order, and Caroline is given no explanation of why she has been sent for.

The reason is her birth: Caroline is the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy duke, and everyone except Caroline herself already knows it. The discovery reorders everything she believed about her own position.

When a young man called Tremadoc, who writes very bad poetry, asks her to elope with him to Gretna Green, she agrees readily, and the novel follows what that decision produces for a woman whose standing in the household has just collapsed.