Cruel as the Grave by E. D. E. N. Southworth

Description

Newlywed love arrives in old Norfolk with trunks full of happiness, and within the first pages the reader understands the name of the burning hearts blazoned over the pair: theirs is a devotion large enough to be tested. The bride’s past is not finished with her, and a beautiful stranger carries a claim that reaches back into a time the marriage was meant to have closed.

What follows is a chase typical of Southworth and executed with her usual ferocious gusto: a flight into a dark house, a jealous bride’s torments, a haunted chapel and a procession of ghosts that is more natural than supernatural and therefore more frightening. Through storm, pursuit and desperation Southworth keeps her heroine’s honor and the reader’s blood pressure in delicate balance, so that the agonies of one woman’s marriage become the engine of a genuinely compulsive narrative.

Why Southworth still hooks readers

• Melodrama at full, deliberate throttle, with every chapter built to a crisis.
• A principled heroine misjudged by the world, a Southworth specialty.
• The 1860s bestseller machinery of secret marriages, false claims and fiery scenes.

About This DodaBooks Edition

All 36 chapters are reset in clean, comfortable type with a working index.