The Countess Fanny : A Cornish sea piece (1856) by Marjorie Bowen
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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.)
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About this eBook
| Author | Bowen, Marjorie, 1888-1952 |
|---|---|
| LoC No. | 28016498 |
| Title | The Countess Fanny : A Cornish sea piece (1856) |
| Original Publication | London: Hodder and Stoughton Limited, 1928. |
| Credits | an anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteer |
| Language | English |
| LoC Class | PR: Language and Literatures: English literature |
| Subject | Cornwall (England : County) -- Fiction |
| Category | Text |
| eBook-No. | 77839 |
| Release Date | Feb 2, 2026 |
| Copyright | Public domain in the USA. |
| Downloads | 237 downloads in the last 30 days. |
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