Marriage and the Gargerys continues the saga from The Estella Trilogy on the independence of women within love and marriage in late Victorian England. Pip Gargery returns from the Africa Mission, where his wife Susanna has died of yellow fever and he then married his former lover Harriet Middleham. As the book opens, Pip’s children Malcolm and Hannah await their arrival at Southampton Docks but with very different attitudes to the marriage, later softened by their own romances and marriages. Malcolm’s marriage to Clara Eustace is very dramatic, but he loses an eye on the North-West Frontier in India at the battle for Chitral, but on the ship home he befriends an amputee officer Tom Hesketh who later marries his sister Hannah. The  Jaggers Trust wrestles with the intractable complexity of owning a huge estate in Ulster where there is arson and profound cultural hatred. Justice is the specific responsibility of a new judge, who is outspoken on infanticide and poverty, homosexuals and human nature, but also on the power of government and the press. Readers of the earlier Trilogy will mourn the death of Nellie, who encounters dementia as she grows old which she treats with her usual good humor before her demise at Estella’s home, Numquam House. Malcolm is sent to South Africa just before the Second Boer War, a story line to be taken up in Volume II.

Volume II, Conscience and the Gargerys is due in October, and Volume III, Politics and the Gargerys, in December 2022.

More information can be found on Hugh Sockett's website.