Grace

Highbury has heard about Miss Grace Cavendish before she has been seen. Wealthy, independent, and the new mistress of Ashwood Park, she arrives in the neighbourhood trailing twelve trunks and considerable speculation. She is seven and twenty, unmarried by choice, and thoroughly uninterested in being anyone’s project. Emma Woodhouse, ever confident in her understanding of people and her talent for improving their situations, has already formed a complete opinion. Mr Knightley, characteristically, has already contradicted it. Set within the world of Jane Austen’s Emma and diverging from it, this story follows Grace Cavendish as she moves through Highbury society — navigating Emma’s charm and complications, Frank Churchill’s performances, Jane Fairfax’s quiet dignity, and the particular texture of a small world that believes it understands everything. Accompanied by her closest friend and companion Mrs Georgiana Grantham, Grace expects a quiet season at a newly inherited estate. She does not expect Mr Knightley. He does not expect her either. What develops between them is not a thunderbolt. It is something quieter, more durable, and considerably harder to dismiss — built from arguments and easy silences, from five minutes apart from a crowded room, from the accumulated weight of two people who recognise in each other something they have not encountered before. A story about clarity. About the difference between familiarity and love. And about what happens to a carefully ordered world when someone arrives who was not accounted for.