The Duke’s Daughter

In The Duke’s Daughter, ordinary country pleasures provide the happenstance for the hopes and hesitations of young love. Family names familiar from earlier installments of Barsetshire series — Marling and Adams, Winter and Waring, Belton and Dale — populate the pages of this engaging novel, as enamored men and women find their way into each other’s hearts, culminating in one day in which three engagements are announced! To the traditional concerns of the gentry is added a fierce displeasure with intrusions of the post-war government (the office of “Red Tape and Sealing Wax”), yet this new-found preoccupation does nothing to deter the onset of a happy ending for all concerned.