London Pride, Or, When the World Was Younger
1896
A father and daughter flee the wreckage of royal England, seeking sanctuary in a foreign convent as the nation that bore them bleeds. Sir John Kirkland, hollowed by grief for his murdered king and his razed home, escorts his young daughter Angela through a winter-wracked landscape where every mile marks another loss. She is his last anchor to hope, her innocence a sharpness that cuts against his darkness. Braddon, better known for her sensation novels, here turns her gift for emotional intensity toward historical fiction, tracing the bonds between parent and child when everything familiar has been torn away. The English Civil War becomes more than backdrop: it is a wound that will not close, and loyalty to the fallen king a burden that bends but does not break this grieving cavalier. What endures is the quiet devastation of a man who has lost his world and the daughter who remains his only reason to walk forward.
