The Mermaid Collection
Down Among the Women
So says Wanda, a former radical who left her husband and raised her daughter Scarlet to be as liberated as she. But twenty-year-old Scarlet, with an abortion already behind her, is about to discover real liberation – as a single mother in Fifties’ London.
Yet Scarlet’s not alone. Meet her friends: Sylvia, the born victim; respectable Jocelyn, willingly trapped in a dull, bourgeois marriage; Audrey, bristling to break free of her conventional life; and Helen, beautiful, vibrant – and very doomed.Over the course of twenty years, from the Fifties to the Seventies, Scarlet, Wanda and their friends will wonder if they can ever become the women they always dreamed of being.
Fenny
Yorkshire teacher Ellen Fenwick has never been abroad. But when her mother dies, this young woman finds herself taking a position as governess to an English girl in Florence in the summer of 1933. Little does Ellen realise how this girl, Juliet, and her family will claim her.
For as the summer passes, Ellen falls so in love with Italy and her new home that she cannot bear to leave – even when her own hopes of love are cruelly thwarted. Even when the shadow of war falls across the country, she doesn’t flee but clings on – for her friends, for those she loves more than herself.
Ellen – selfless, big-hearted, accepting – cannot know what is coming. Yet, she will not face it alone . . .
Lucy Carmichael
Lucy Carmichael is jilted at the altar. But no matter. Her loving and kind family never liked her explorer fiancé anyway.
Instead of moping or falling into her supportive family’s arms, however, Lucy abandons their suburban home. Heading for the country, she takes up a teaching position in the industrial town of Ravonsbridge.
There, she finds solace in her work, in her new (rather gossipy) colleagues – and rediscovers her sensible young self. But if Lucy has, despite everything, kept her head – where lies her heart?
Through A Glass, Darkly
‘They watch me all the time. In and out of the classroom, their eyes are always following me . . .’
Quiet, gentle, young Faustina Crayle is dismissed from her teaching position at Brereton School for Girls after just a few weeks. She is given no explanation, but it’s clear certain staff and pupils fear her.
Her friend and fellow teacher Gisela contacts psychologist and sleuth Dr Basil Willing who offers to investigate these outlandish claims. But this only confirms two damning facts – first, that this happened at a previous school and, second, people believe there are two sides to enigmatic Faustina.
When a body is found at the school and Faustina is implicated in the death, it is clear that darkness swirls around this young woman. But is she the perpetrator or victim?