The Daughters of Mannerling

About The Daughters of Mannerling

When the reckless Beverley family loses Mannerling, their beloved ancestral estate, to a gambling debt, each of the six Beverley sisters -- Isabella, Jessica, Abigail, Rachel, Belinda and Lizzie -- responds to the loss in her own way, but nearly all of them share one obsession in common: getting Mannerling back, whatever it costs. Beginning with The Banishment, the series follows the sisters one by one as they navigate courtships complicated by that inheritance -- suitors who might restore the house, matches that would mean giving up the dream of it forever, and the slow, hard-won realization that a home isn't only a building.

Written under the Marion Chesney name in the mid-1990s, the series is unusual among Beaton's multi-sister Regency series for giving its family drama a genuinely obsessive, almost gothic edge -- Mannerling itself functions almost as a character, and the sisters' fixation on reclaiming it drives real conflict between them, not just external courtship plots. Each book resolves its featured sister's romance, but the Mannerling question itself only fully resolves by series' end, giving this sextet more of a through-line than some of Beaton's other sister series.

How to read this series

Publication order, starting with The Banishment (1995). Because the family's shared obsession with reclaiming Mannerling carries across all six books and only fully resolves at the close of The Homecoming, this series rewards reading start to finish more than most of Beaton's other multi-sister Regencies -- each sister's individual romance is complete within her own book, but the larger Mannerling arc is genuinely serialized.