The Favoured Child

Wideacre

Philippa Gregory

Wideacre Hall, set in the heart of the English countryside, is the ancestral home that Beatrice Lacey loves. But as a woman of the eighteenth century, she has no right of inheritance. Corrupted by a world that mistreats women, she sets out to corrupt others. Sexual and wilful, she believes that the only way to achieve control over Wideacre is through a series of horrible crimes, and no-one escapes the consequences of her need to possess the land.

‘The eighteenth-century woman is a neglected creature but, in the figure of her heroine, Philippa Gregory has defined a certain kind of witness…This is a novel written from instinct, not out of calculation, and it shows.’

PETER ACKROYD, The Times

‘For single mindedness, tempestuousness, passion, amorality, sensuality and plain old-fashioned evil, [Beatrice Lacey] knocks Scarlett O’Hara into short cotton socks.’

Evening Standard

ISBN 0 00 651461 8