The Burning Bride [Hardcover]

Margaret Lawrence (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 7, 1998

It is a chilly Autumn in Rufford, Maine, but violent passions and tempers inflamed in the wake of America's war of independence are still burning white hot. Perparing for her pucoming marriage -- pregnant with the child of Daniel Josselyn -- Hannah Trevor's happiness is overshadowed by news that her cousin Jonathan is missing and feared dead. One of a band of Regulators -- farmers turned militant rebels in protest of crippling taxation -- Jonathan is presumed to have fled into the Outward, the fast forests that border on Rufford. Then, with tensions in town reaching an explosive level, a body is discovered at the edge of the same wilderness.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Life in Maine in the years after the Revolutionary War continues to be hard for Hannah Trevor, the gifted, conflicted midwife who sprang to full reality in Margaret Lawrence's Hearts and Bones and continued to grow in its equally strong successor, Blood Red Roses. Five months pregnant with the much-wanted child of her lover, the English aristocrat Daniel Josselyn, strong-willed Hannah still can't decide if she wants to marry him. "It seemed too much like a fairy tale to be credited and, like a stone in her boot heel, the voice of reason grumbled: Madam Midwife, you are eight-and-thirty, and froward. He finds you pleasant enough in the darkness, no doubt.... I am not made for a gentleman's lady. I will wound him one day, deep, deep." Meanwhile, Hannah's position as an equal, honored guest in the welcoming household of her Aunt Julia and Uncle Henry Markham is threatened by the demands of their jealous daughter-in-law, Sally. Sally is married to the Markham's fugitive son Jonathan who is under sentence of death for nonpayment of taxes to the financially and morally bankrupt new country. "Julia stared into the kettle, her mouth set and her eyes brimming. If he lived and was pardoned at last, Jonathan would one day inherit Two Mills from his father. And Julia's own place in the house would then depend almost entirely upon Sally's good will." Hannah and Daniel's troubles are increased by two murders: of a local sawbones who brought charges against the midwife for criticizing his overuse of narcotics, and of a high-court official killed by militiamen under Daniel's control.

As she did in her two previous books, Lawrence uses the metaphor and skills of quilting to stitch together fictional and real public documents (a quote from Abigail Adams to Thomas Jefferson is particularly telling), recipes, household tips, journal fragments, and easily accessible period dialogue into a book with perhaps a bit more history than mystery but enough delight and dignity to be fully satisfying. --Dick Adler

From Publishers Weekly

Pregnant women and jealous men populate the landscape of Lawrence's third heavily atmospheric Revolutionary War story (after Blood Red Roses and Hearts and Bones) featuring Maine midwife Hannah Trevor, who once again contends with authority, both individual and institutional, to save her own life and the lives of those she loves. During the annual military muster, the body of "barber-surgeon" Samuel Clinch is found shot in the head and the chest and with his feet burned. Hannah, four months pregnant with her lover Daniel's child, becomes a suspect because she had publicly derided Clinch's methods of childbirthing. She's let off the hook when another scapegoat, Clinch's black servant, is blamed for the killing. When Master Royallton-Smith of the General Court is shot twice?like Clinch?militiamen are present, and Daniel, as their commander, is held responsible. Hannah manages to marry Daniel before he is taken away. Then, to secure the serene family life that she desires, she sets about to discover who killed the two prominent men. But in the postwar milieu of the 1780s, determining who had cause to murder Clinch and Royallton-Smith yields a tangled web of intrigue. In the middle of the knotted case are three pregnant weavers whose men seek retaliation for the women's abuse at the hands of wealthy, amoral men. Rife with period detail and heavy with references to repressed emotion and sexuality, this third historical saga nearly buries its thin thread of mystery in the oppressive tale of postwar machinations and tortured personal intentions.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow; 1st edition (October 7, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 038097620X
• ISBN-13: 978-0380976201
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,732,280 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incredible story, April 12, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Burning Bride (Hardcover)

After reading Hearts and Bones and Blood Red Roses by Margaret Lawrence I couldn't resist spending a few extra dollars on the hardback edition of The Burning Bride. I wasn't disappointed.

This is an incredible series set a few years after the Revolutionary War in Maine. The story centers around Hanna Trevor, the local mid-wife, her lover Daniel Josselyn and their daughter, Jennett.

In each book the story becomes more complex and the characters are more interesting. The series is about life after the Revolutionary War and how everything wasn't the picture perfect life everybody thought it to be. Greed, debtors prison, taxes, murder, treason, audultery, rape, prostitution and love are all intertrined in this incredible story. Ms. Lawrence has outdone herself.

I definetly recommend starting with the first of the series.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superlative historical fiction, November 28, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Burning Bride (Hardcover)

These three books are a must-read for anyone interested in the post revolutionary period. Beautifully written, unusual in form, with wonderful characterizations: Lawrence succeeds where so many don't even try to make us understand the women of this time and place. There is a love story (although I would disagree with the reviewer -- it is not steamy, but simply evocative, and touching), and there are mysteries, and both of them are wonderfully done but these novels are more than the sum of their parts. Lawrence draws on the life of Hannah Trevor, a midwife who lived in Maine during this period, and in doing so she brings that resonant and important voice back to life.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not as good as the first two, but perhaps I should have read them back to back instead of years apart!, December 17, 2007

By 

Lilly Flora "by Lilo Drandoff" (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

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This review is from: The Burning Bride (Mass Market Paperback)

It's been a long time since I read the first two books in this series, and so I was a little confused when reading the last. I had forgotten the names of the many characters, their histories, what was going on via government at the time. Eventually though, I figured it out. I would recommend reading the three books in this series back to back though instead of spread out. It will give you a bigger picture of the story.

This is the third, and I think last, book in the Hanna Trevor series. Its fall in Maine and the annual Mustering of the Militia has come. Hanna's soon to be husband, and father of her daughter and unborn child is in charge of the Militia. At the same time a riot act is being enforced because of the massive debt problems and the mustering of the common people against the courts. And of course, a man is found murdered.

Initially the thought is that the mans servant killed him. But when another man is killed, shot from a long distance by an expert sniper, it brings back memories of the war to Hanna's Daniel of a similar situation and three sisters.....

Like the others, the story is told through multiple points of view, character journal entries, coroners findings, biographical sections on characters...even recopies. This method does make for an easy and interesting way of piecing together the evidence (as one of the sections is called.)

I have to admit I was a little disappointed by the mystery aspect of this book. I had the identity of the killer figured out very early, though admittedly I didn't understand all the elements at play. What was good in this novel was everything else that was going on-the political strife, the rupture in the town between rich and poor, the coming together of Daniel and Hanna.

Overall though, this book doesn't meet the quality of the first two, Hearts and Bones and Blood Red Roses. Also every killer this author writes about is mad in some way and while this brings up interesting questions about weather or not you have to be insane in some way to take another's life, I know that there are calculated murders that are done for gain and not because of any emotional instability. It would be nice to see Hanna figure out one of those because otherwise the town she lives in has a disproportionate number of insane people (and murders to think of it.)

Three Stars.