"The Unknown Ajax" 1959 HEYER, Georgette (SOLD)

HEYER, Georgette

[314] pp.

William Heinemann Ltd.

1959

First Edition

8" x 5 1/2"

Wrapper design by A.E. Barbosa

VG/ VG

The Unknown Ajax is a Regency romance by Georgette Heyer, published in 1959 by Heinemann in the UK and in 1960 by Putnam in the US. It was her forty-seventh novel and the eighteenth set in Regency times.

Plot
The novel is set in 1817. Owing to the death of his official heir in a boating accident, the domineering Lord Darracott has had to summon the next in line, his grandson Major Hugo Darracott, to the ancestral mansion on the marshland borders of Kent and Sussex. The rest of the family have come to Darracott Place to meet him, and possibly to take in hand his ineligibility. These include his uncle, Matthew, a politician married to the aristocratic Lady Aurelia, and their sons Vincent and Claud; his uncle Rupert's widow Elvira and her children, the rebellious Anthea and the teenaged Richmond. Hugo's father had disgraced himself years before by "marrying a weaver’s daughter" in Huddersfield and his assembled relations are expecting a working- or at most, lower middle-class man. Sensing their hostility, Hugo obliges them by adopting a Yorkshire accent and "gaumless" manner to match his large and bovine appearance.