The Sherbrooke Bride

The Sherbrooke Bride is a historical romance by the American writer Catherine Coulter, published by Jove in 1992. It is the first of her novels about the Sherbrooke family and their descendants.

Douglas Sherbrooke is an earl with a problem that the aristocracy of his period takes seriously: he needs an heir, and the natural way of producing one is a marriage he is not especially interested in arranging for its own sake. Alexandra Chambers has been in love with him since she was fifteen, which is a fact that she has no way of announcing and that the family arrangements do not take into account, because everyone's attention is fixed on her sister, the celebrated beauty of the family. The book follows the negotiations, the misunderstandings and the marriages that follow, and it keeps to the conventions of the genre: a couple compelled towards each other by circumstance, an estate that has to be preserved, and a great deal of the weather and social life of the English countryside.

Coulter wrote many novels in this register and at this length, and the Sherbrooke books are among the most-read of them, following the family through several generations and across the Atlantic.