The Shuttle (novel) lay their coronets, and incidentally their hearts, at the feet of the all-conquering American Girl.’ The building and grounds of ‘Stornham Court’ were modelled after Great Maytham Hall, near Rolvenden in Kent, which had a beautiful garden that Bettina starts restoring in "The Shuttle" and which also inspired the titular garden of "The Secret Garden". Angelica Shirley Carpenter writes in "In the Garden, Essays in Honor of Frances Hodgson Burnett" that Burnett's depiction of Sir Nigel's abuse of Rosalie mirrors the abuse that Burnett herself suffered at the hands of her second husband Stephen: "All the classic signs of abuse,
The Secret Lovers (novel) The Secret Lovers (novel) The Secret Lovers, published by E.P. Dutton in 1977, was the third of seven novels by the American novelist Charles McCarry to feature an American intelligence agent named Paul Christopher. It takes place in 1960 and '61, a year after the events in the first Christopher novel, "The Miernik Dossier", published in 1973, and three years before the beginning of "The Tears of Autumn", published in 1974, which was actually the second book McCarry wrote about Christopher. Later books by McCarry, ten in all as of 2013, expanded from focusing solely on Christopher into what might