Emily Fox-Seton

Emily Fox-Seton is a simple but good-hearted woman struggling to make ends meet while attempting to maintain the dignity of someone distantly related to the aristocracy. The Marquis of Walderhurst is an awkward but eligible bachelor being comically pursued by a pageant of unmarried ladies. When the Marquis surprises everyone by giving his attentions to Emily, he makes himself a fairy prince in her eyes. But marrying her prince is not the end of Emily's troubles.

In early 1901, 15 years after Little Lord Fauntleroy and 10 years before The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote The Making of a Marchioness. She followed this short novel in the spring of the same year with the sequel, The Methods of Lady Walderhurst. The satisfying Cinderella quality of the first book which illustrated the harsh realism of Edwardian society, combines with the exciting melodramatic developments in the second book to create an intriguing story that continues to entertain us today.

Emily rents a room in a boarding house in London where she makes a modest living as an assistant to aristocratic ladies. One summer, Lady Maria Bayne asks Emily to her country estate and it’s there that Emily receives a very surprising offer of marriage from a wealthy widower in need of a wife. But Emily’s new life is not without its own obstacles and challenges.