The Head of the House of Coombe

The novel opens on the eve of catastrophe. Feather Gareth-Lawless is everything shallow and splendid about the Edwardian elite: beautiful, self-indulgent, and utterly unprepared for the modern age. When her husband dies, Feather discovers the brutal arithmetic beneath the champagne and cotillion. Their Mayfair townhouse, her glittering social life, her very identity were built on a foundation of debt and delusion. Now she must navigate a world that rewards nothing she knows. Written in 1922, looking back at the frivolous world that marched itself into the trenches, Burnett offers not a sentimental redemption but a sharper truth: the game was always rigged, and survival requires learning new rules. The daughter she once called an "intruder" will inherit a different England.