Marian Halcombe

This first episode of The Most Dangerous Woman series was first released in 2018 as A New Journal, but is now eponymously titled Marian Holcombe. It’s a rousing historical pastiche that follows up on the characters in Wilkie Collins’s A Women in White. It’s also very much in the spirit of other Victorian countryside sagas such as Alcott’s early novel The Inheritance. Clough’s first in this series is a well-researched tale incorporating British law at the time, with details about life in prison, housing inadequacies of the urban poor, and the travails of middle class pregnancy. It’s also suspenseful, and often very funny. I see that there are a dozen novels in Clough’s Marian Holcombe series coming out, which I look forward to exploring.