Escapade - Jane Aiken Hodge

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Résumé :
I don't want to die, she thought, I just want everything to be different, to get away from it all. Charlotte Comlyn is running away. From a marriage proposal, from her fortune, and from a series of misunderstandings with her parents. Disguised in her brother's clothes, she appears at the London home of her mother's estranged best friend, the actress Beth Prior, whose beauty and talent are exceeded only by her terrible reputation. But Beth is more than just an infamous celebrity. She has a mission: to befriend the exiled Hapsburg Queen Maria Carolina of Naples and convince her to ally with Britain against a looming threat from Napoleon. Short on options and in need of companionship, Charlotte agrees to follow Beth to Palermo, plunging them into the glittering world of aristocratic games and political intrigue. Beth is questioning her choices and Charlotte is questioning everything, but can they find peace when nothing is quite what it seems? Escapade was first published in 1993.

Biographie:
Jane Aiken Hodge was born in Massachusetts, but moved with her family to East Sussex in Britain when she was three years old. After reading English in Somerville College, Oxford, she moved to the US to undertake a second degree at Radcliffe College. Whilst she was there, she spent time as a civil servant and worked for Time Magazine before returning to the UK to focus on her career as a novelist. In 1972 she became a British citizen. She is the daughter of the Pulitzer prize-winning poet, Conrad Aiken. Aiken Hodge is known for her works of historical romance. In a career spanning nearly fifty years, she published over thirty novels, exploring contemporary settings and the detective genre in her later life. She died in 2009, aged ninety-two.