The Countess Fanny : $b A Cornish sea piece (1856)
| Language | en |
|---|---|
| First published | 2026-02-02 |
| Rights | Public domain in the USA. |
| Gutenberg ID | #77839 |
Description
The Countess Fanny by Marjorie Bowen is a novel written in the early 20th century. It reads as a historical drama set on a storm-lashed Cornish coast, where propriety, passion, and a guarded secret converge around Ambrosia Sellar, her forceful brother Oliver, and his young Italian ward and fiancée, the dazzling Countess Fanny. With a brooding country house and a perilous lighthouse as backdrop, the story promises a clash of temperament and culture, and the slow tightening of a mystery hinted at from the first page. The opening of the novel sets a tone of secrecy in a brief prologue, where an old man implies he has kept a life-defining truth about “the Countess Fanny.” We then meet Ambrosia Sellar, elegant yet despondent at gloomy Sellar’s Mead, bracing for winter and for Oliver’s return with his teenage ward-bride from Italy—a union that will merge estates but feels ill-matched. Ambrosia confers uneasily with the village vicar, meets the arrivals at a bleak ferry, and instantly senses both Fanny’s beauty and self-possession and Oliver’s sullen, proprietary mood; dinner that night is tense, and Ambrosia catches a flash of raw passion in her brother’s look. A visit to Lord Lefton introduces Ambrosia’s fiancé, Lucius, and his consuming interest in the newly rebuilt lighthouse at St. Nite’s—a symbol of danger and obsession—before Fanny produces a letter from her former companion, Madame de Mailly, warning that the engagement is a foolish mismatch pressed by Oliver’s ardor. (This is an automatically generated summary.)