Historical Manners

Hannah Miles navigates the etiquette of monster hunting through the parlours of a magical Regency England. This collection contains: Manners and Monsters, Galvanism and Ghouls, and Gossip and Gorgons.

If 14-year-old Cassandra Reed makes it through her first day at Miss Castwell’s Institute for the Magical Instruction of Young Ladies without anyone discovering her secret, maybe, just maybe, she’ll let herself believe that she really does belong at Miss Castwell’s. Except Cassandra Reed’s real name is Sarah Smith and up until now, she lived her whole life in the Warren, serving a magical family, the Winters, as all non-magical “Snipes” are bound by magical Guardian law to do. That is, until one day, Sarah accidentally levitates Mrs. Winter’s favorite vase in the parlor....

It is a truth universally accepted that well-bred members of society are not beleaguered with magic. For Elsabeth Dover and her sisters, that truth means living in a perpetual state of caution, never using their sorcerous gifts in public. Elsabeth chafes under the stricture, although not enough to risk the possibility of good marriages for her sisters...until she meets handsome, arrogant Fitzgerald Archer

When Arabella Grant’s wicked aunt dies suddenly, both Arabella and her cousin Lady Isabelle cannot help but feel relieved. She’d made their lives miserable, and now Lady Issie is free to read to her heart’s content, and Bella is free from taunts about her ignoble birth. Their newfound freedom is threatened, however, when Issie’s great-aunt commands her to travel to London for a come-out Issie has never wanted. Issie, who is in poor health, is convinced she’ll drop dead like her mother did if she drops into a curtsy before the queen.

How would the story of Pride and Prejudice be altered if Mr. Wickham had been a good man? Instead of becoming a scoundrel who regularly attempts to elope with teenage girls, Mr. Wickham studies the law as he originally told Mr. Darcy when he gave up the value of the living. After finishing his studies, Mr. Wickham finds work in Meryton with Mr. Phillips, a local solicitor and the Bennets's uncle.

Fourteen-year old Sophronia is the bane of her mother's existence. More interested in dismantling clocks and climbing trees than proper etiquette at tea - and god forbid anyone see her atrocious curtsy - Mrs. Temminnick is desperate her daughter become a proper lady. She enrolls Sophronia in Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality.

But little do Sophronia or her mother know that this is a school where ingenious young girls learn to finish all right - but it's a different kind of finishing.

When a dastardly Pickleman plot comes to fruition, only Sophronia can save her friends, her school, and all of London...but at what cost? Our proper young heroine puts her training and skills to the test in this highly anticipated conclusion of the rousing, intriguing, and always polished New York Times best-selling Finishing School series!

Everyone in Highley eagerly anticipates the arrival of Reginald Abernathy, the new master of Albon Manor. Everyone, that is, except Lord William Bascomb. William knows he’ll be expected to woo Reginald’s sister, and he can't summon the interest for it. But when the Abernathys arrive at last, William discovers he’s interested after all - in Reginald. Reginald is the most handsome, most dashing, most intriguing man he’s ever known. Better yet, he seems to share William's preference for men.

Sophronia continues her second year at finishing school in style - with a steel-bladed fan secreted in the folds of her ball gown, of course. Such a fashionable choice of weapon comes in handy when Sophronia, her best friend Dimity, sweet sootie Soap, and the charming Lord Felix Mersey stowaway on a train to return their classmate Sidheag to her werewolf pack in Scotland. No one suspected what - or who - they would find aboard that suspiciously empty train.

1885, London, England. When Violet's Aunt Adelia decides to abscond with her newest paramour, she leaves behind her role as the most popular Agony Aunt in London, Miss Hermione, in Violet's hands. And of course, the first letter Violet receives is full, not of prissy pondering, but of portent: Ivy Armstrong is in need of help and fears for her life. But when Violet visits the village from which the letter was posted, she finds Ivy dead. Soon Violet discovers that when you represent the best-loved Agony Aunt in Britain, both marauding husbands and murder are par for the course.

As a member of the Knights of the Realm, Reid swore an oath to protect her king only to discover he harbors a traitorous agenda. Being a woman raised in a man’s world, Reid thought becoming a Knight would give her purpose and strength. So far, it has done nothing but give her trouble. The king ordered her to spy on the Axian royal family while she prepares for her marriage - a marriage neither she nor Price Dexter wants. Once in Axian, Reid realizes she’s being used as a pawn in a decades-old political match.

It is 1939. Europe is on the brink of war when young Lily Shepherd boards an ocean liner in Essex, bound for Australia. She is ready to start anew, leaving behind the shadows in her past. The passage proves magical, complete with live music, cocktails, and fancy dress balls. The voyage shows Lily places she'd only ever dreamed of and enables her to make friends with those above her social station. She even allows herself to hope that a man she couldn't possibly have a future with might return her feelings. But Lily soon realizes that she's not the only one hiding secrets.

The School for Manners finds the Tribble sisters, Amy and Effie, once again entangled in the machinations of the marriage mart. The formidable but lovable spinsters, who earn their livings by sponsoring young girls and finding them husbands, take on the case of Delilah, a beautiful, mindlessly flirtatious country heiress. What puzzles everyone is why such a beauty is unmarried at 23, and why she is ensconced in the London school of the zany Tribbles.

Lovely, wealthy, and well bred, Clarissa Vevian has been unable to find a suitable husband because of her terrible clumsiness. Her petite and fastidious mother, the Lady Clarendon, has tried to mold Clarissa into a dainty miss to fit the fashion, but until the fashions fit tall Clarissa, her mother’s efforts are doomed to fail.

When Amy and Effy Tribble, two charming but impoverished spinster sisters, lose out on a much needed inheritance, they place an advertisement in The Morning Post and hire themselves out as professional chaperones. Vowing to prepare even the most difficult misses for marriage, the Tribble sisters will spend a London season on each client in this delightful Regency series, The School for Manners. Felicity Baronsheath, their first assignment, turns out to be more of a challenge than they ever imagined.

In 1627 Barbary pirates raided the coast of Iceland and abducted some 400 of its people, including 250 from a tiny island off the mainland. Among the captives sold into slavery in Algiers were the island pastor, his wife and their three children. Although the raid itself is well documented, little is known about what happened to the women and children afterwards. It was a time when women everywhere were largely silent.

Miss Harriet Brown, daughter of a Methodist minister, is the embodiment of propriety and Christian charity - too much so, perhaps, for her own good. The virtues Harriet possesses are far from fashionable, but Amy and Effy Tribble, chaperones-for-hire, feel confident that their new charge will attract a worthy vicar or two before the end of the season. First, though, they must vanquish confirmed rake and gambler Lord Charles Marsham, catch though he is, who seems perversely determined to woo Harriet.

The 18th century novelist-of-manners-turned-sleuth returns to delight readers with another nimble-witted investigation of mayhem in the pastoral landscape of rural England. When Jane's gentleman friend Lord Trowbridge sends her, in the utmost secrecy, to retrieve a parcel hidden amidst the ruins of Netley Abbey, Jane finds not only the parcel but also a dying man. When events take a regrettably sinister turn, only Jane is clever enough to pursue the miscreant.

Maria Kendall is stunningly beautiful, impeccably mannered, effortlessly graceful - in short, a perfect candidate for marriage. Thus all of polite London society is astonished that she is the latest charge of Amy and Effy Tribble, eccentric spinsters specializing in making matches for unmarriageable misses. But when Maria’s suitors - among them the roguish and exceedingly aristocratic Duke of Berham - meet her vulgar and boorish parents, proposals of marriage invariably vanish.

It is 1940 and twenty-year-old Charlotte Richmond watches from her attic window as enemy planes fly over London. Still grieving her beloved brother, who never returned from France, she is trying to keep herself out of trouble: holding down a typist job at the Ministry of Information, sharing gin and confidences with her best friend, Elena, and dodging her overbearing father. On her way to work she often sees the boy who feeds the birds—a source of unexpected joy amid the rubble of the Blitz. But every day brings new scenes of devastation.