A Dubious Legacy

On a midsummer weekend in 1954, James and Matthew, two rather priggish young Englishmen, take their girls, Barbara and Antonia, on a short holiday in order to propose marriage. The rundown but charming country house of their older friend Henry Tillotson and the extravagant dinner party he has promised them seem the ideal surroundings. But none of the guests is prepared for the romantic drama that is about to unfold about them - and that will spin itself out over the next four decades. For before the drama is over, James and Matthew will discover that neither of their young women is quite as unworldly as she appeared to be. Barbara and Antonia will fall under the spell of Henry's wife, the eccentric Margaret, who, although voluntarily bedridden, wields an uncanny control over the husband she married years before under quite unorthodox circumstances. Most of all, the reader will have succumbed to the appeal of this effortlessly complex, tragicomic novel about love and its entrapments. Endowing it with the charm of a twentieth-century A Midsummer Night's Dream, Mary Wesley has created in A Dubious Legacy another of her glorious contemporary classic novels.