'We were seventeen when our parents died...Alexander and I did not realise at first that we were destitute. It was Sir Charles Stowell, a friend of my father's who finally told us the my father's forutnes and estates, including even the town house in London where we had lived all our lives with our mother, had reverted to my father's wife in Manchester. My father had been mcuh too gay and carefree to bother to make a will to provide for his mistress and the tiwns she had borne him...' When her parents die in a road accident, Marianne, illegitimate daughter of a French emigree and an English gentleman, loses her home and all her wordly goods. She faces life as a governess until she meets Axel Branson, a man who must marry within the year in order to inherit his father's wealth. Marianne grabs at the chance of a respectable marriage. A remote house in the Kent Marshes is now her home. But distrust of her husband and fear of the house seem to roll in as steadily as the sea mist...
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Susan Howatch was born in Surrey in 1940. After taking a degree in law she emigrated to America where she married, had a daughter and embarked on a career as a writer. She left in 1976 and lived in the Republic of Ireland for four years before returning to England. She lived in Salisbury - inspiration for the very successful Starbridge sequence and now lives in London.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great gothic,
By naenti (MALAYSIA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Shrouded Walls (Hardcover)
I really enjoyed this Susan Howatch book. Despite the formulaic plot, the characterisation of the heroine and the hero are slightly out of the ordinary. In the midst of the murders and detection, the romance is nicely developed. The heroine is quite young and childish but the hero, Axel is approriately mysterious! A well written Gothic read and the only historical one out of the six short novels that Howatch wrote before her masterpiece Penmarric was published.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Standard-formula Victorian gothic,
This review is from: The Shrouded Walls (Mass Market Paperback)
Gothics were my standard reading fare in my teens and early twenties (Victoria Holt, Phyllis Whitney and others) but I haven't read one in many years. So I decided to take a step back in time by reading a Victorian Gothic, The Shrouded Walls by Susan Howatch.The Shrouded Walls is just standard Victorian Gothic fare, nothing really original: young heroine virtually alone in the world; rich, mysterious older man who sweeps her off her feet and into a hurried marriage; a huge, old family mansion; murder and tense undercurrents among her husband's numerous family members. There is nothing wrong with The Shrouded Walls, it is just a very stereotypical Gothic. In fact, I think the writing is a bit better than what I remember of Victoria Holt, as Howatch's characters seem infused with a bit more feeling that Holt's, and Howatch's heroine has more spark and spunk than any of Holt's (I don't remember Phyllis Whitney's style so much; perhaps I need to give one of her books a re-read one of these days). And Howatch's plot was a tiny bit less predictable than the norm, since usually the young innocent heroine finds herself falling in love with her husband, in spite of all the dark secrets and unknowns that start to surface about him. In fact, that is one of the standard plot devices of a Gothic that is supposed to create tension and uncertainty; however, it never does because after reading one Gothic you know that the object of the heroine's love never ends up being the culprit. Howatch, however, makes her plot slightly less predictable in that the heroine isn't in love with her husband; she alternates between being drawn to him out of extreme loneliness and being unattracted to him. This makes it not at all certain to the reader whether or not her husband really is guilty of the things she begins to suspect him of. All in all, The Shrouded Walls delivered just what I expected from it; a nice, short break in-between other books. Yes, the plot strains credulity, but who expects realism from a Gothic? They are escapist entertainment; The Shrouded Walls is an excellent short intermission between more serious reading matter, and I can recommend it as such.
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