Margaret Montfort

Fernley House has been quiet since Aunt Faith died two months earlier. Margaret has stayed on with her Uncle John, keeping his house and discovering, slowly and with some embarrassment, how much of the running of it she never noticed. The servants notice first. Then Cousin Sophronia Montfort arrives unannounced and declares that she has come to take Aunt Faith’s place, then settles in to find fault with the carpets, with Margaret’s inexperience, and later with the three motherless young cousins whom Uncle John invites for the rest of the summer. This second book in the Margaret series, published in 1898, keeps its scale small: tempers held or lost, a household learned from the inside, and letters arriving from the other two Margarets, Peggy and Rita.