Anya Seton

""There was, on the Hudson, a way of life such as this, and there was a house not unlike Dragonwyck." In the spring of 1844 the Wells family receives a letter from a distant relative, the wealthy landowner Nicholas Van Ryn. He invites one of their daughters for an extended visit to his Hudson Valley estate, Dragonwyck. Eighteen-year-old Miranda, bored with the local suitors and her commonplace life on the farm, leaps at the chance for escape....

This is the story of Marblehead, from its earliest settlement to the present, and of a family who settled and stayed there in the Hearth and Eagle Inn; it is also the story of Hesper Honeywood, a passionate young woman whose long and dramatic life, full of triumph and tragedy, contained the history of both.