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The Hidden Heart of Emily Hudson
- Author: Melissa Jones
- Category: Fiction Historical Literary Women’s / Romance
- Publisher: Little, Brown (UK) / Penguin (US)
- Pub date: January 2010
- Length: 368 pages
About The Hidden Heart of Emily Hudson
this is no ordinary piece of Victoriana… In this novel she is given the life she deserved
- THE TIMES
the psychological tension subtly takes hold of the reader and does not let go. This is a wonderful book and it will not disappoint
– Independent
[An] absorbing, thoughtful, romantic tale
– Daily Mail
Dear Mr Cornford, It is with regret that I begin the task of writing to you about your niece, Emily. Her recent behaviour, which I have outlined to you in previous letters, compels me to request that she be formally removed from the school and returned to your care with immediate effect.
And so Emily Hudson, niece and ward, is dispatched into the care of her distant and cold uncle, to take residence at the family‘s Newport beach house at the outbreak of the Civil War. She is an orphan, the sole member of her family not claimed by consumption.
In that first lonely summer, it is Emily‘s cousin William – himself an outsider – who is her saviour. Her spirit and vibrancy are at odds with the stilted climate of American society: a woman should be a paragon of virtue, definitely not an aspiring painter with no fortune to speak of. William‘s friendship offers Emily the chance to escape to London to pursue her dreams, but his patronage soon turns darker and more controlling. And as Emily‘s health falters, she turns to some rather unsuitable means to find the release she craves…
About the Author
Melissa Jones was born in London in 1965. The early London life that she shared with her sister, novelist Sadie Jones, was full of actors, directors and artists talking late into the night, playing poker and laughing. From her mother she inherited a love of beautiful things, food, houses and gardens; from her father a sense of foreignness based on his stories of growing up as one of seven children on a large country property in Jamaica before electricity and the telephone.
After graduating from Oxford University, Melissa began working in TV in London, first as a runner and PA and then after joining SelecTV (maker of Birds of a Feather and Lovejoy) as a script editor and producer. She then wrote her first two books, Cold in Earth (1998), and Sick at Heart (1999), both dark books that were very well reviewed.
While her two children were young Melissa was distracted into a number of different jobs, writing proposals for the accountancy firm, KPMG, journalism for the architectural press, and a book called Interiors for the Under Fives, published by Wiley in 2005. In 2007 she and her family moved to Essex, where she wrote her new novel, THE HIDDEN HEART OF EMILY HUDSON.