Moon Rising - Hardcover

Ann Victoria Roberts

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0701163526 ISBN 13: 9780701163525

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 2000

Synopsis

A novel of passion and possesion and the writer of DRACULA in 19th-century Whitby - perfectly researched, beautifully and grippingly written by the author of LOUISA ELLIOT. One long hot summer in the 1880s Bram Stoker escaped to Whitby from the pressures of theatre life in London. These months are unaccounted for in life of the irish-born theatre manager, and around them Ann Roberts has woven a passionate, mysterious and enthralling fiction. In Whitby he has an intense and dangerous affair with a young fisherlass from an old seafaring family, who introduces him to the wild sea, the wrecks, the ruins & to local legends (many of which find their way later into Dracula ), and to his own weaknessess and desires. The novel starts with their meeting many years later, by which time she's a successful ship-broker and he's an old man, but intriguingly it takes several chapters before we realise who this mystery man is. As things fall into place, the novel becomes not only a haunting mystery but also a woman's story of the tragic love affair which marked the rest of her life, as well as a highly original commentary on the genesis of that immortal classic, Dracula .

About this title

About the Author

Ann Victoria Roberts made her fictional debut with Louisa Elliott, which was translated into several languages and followed by Morning's Gate. She divides her time between her home in York and a cottage in Whitby, England.

From Publishers Weekly

A passionate affair between Damaris Sterne, an orphaned fishergirl living in the English seaside village of Whitby, and Bram Stoker, future author of Dracula, married and 20 years her senior, is the focus of Roberts's (Louisa Elliott) atmospheric, well-researched historical romance. The story opens with a chance reunion of the couple two decades after their affair. The once impoverished young girl, now named Marie Lindsey, has become successful in the male-dominated world of shipping and is a wealthy widow; Stoker, longtime business manager to the era's eminent Shakespearean actor, is old and frailDhis fame as a novelist won't come until much later. He and "Damsy" met during a lethal gale that inspired the storm in Dracula. She lived with her cousin Bella, and the girls hawked fish; enterprising and feisty, Damsy also posed for photographs sold as picture-cards to tourists. The cousins' lives diverged when Bella, victimized by incest, was driven to prostitution, whereas Damsy matured during her passionate liaison with Stoker, to whom she confided local legends. Subsequently, she survived a botched abortion, dropped "old-fashioned" Damaris for a more fashionable name and obtained a job as companion to the elderly matron of a shipping family, acquiring a knowledge of trade that led to marriage, a career and good fortuneDalthough she did not escape treachery and sorrow along the way. As a rags-to-riches heroine, her mindset and self-assurance are ahead of their time, but this gothic romance offers the dramatic thrills and titillating sex common to the genre and adds the cachet of imagining the source of Stoker's classic. It's a cut well above similar novels. (Jan. 19)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Chatto & Windus
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0701163526
• ISBN 13: 9780701163525
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 416