FICTION · GENERAL
Jane Aiken Hodge
Also known as: Jane (Aiken) Hodge, Jane Aiken HODGE
Jane Aiken Hodge was an American-born British writer. Born near Cambridge, Massachusetts, the second child of Pulitzer prize-winning poet Conrad Aiken and his first wife, the writer Jessie McDonald. Jane Hodge was 3 years old when her family moved to Great Britain, settling in Rye, East Sussex where her younger sister, Joan, who would become a novelist and a children’s writer, was born. Their parents’ marriage was dissolved in 1929. From 1935, Jane Hodge read English at Somerville College, Oxford University, and in 1938 she took a second degree in English at Radcliffe College, USA, her mother’s alma mater. She was a civil servant for a time, and also worked for Time Magazine, before returning to the UK in 1947. Her works of fiction include historical novels and contemporary detective novels. In 1972 she renounced her United States citizenship and became a British subject. For many years a believer in the right of people to end their own lives, Hodge chose to end her own life by means of an overdose in June 2009.
Most acclaimed
Whispering
1995
When teenage Caterina Gomez returns from England to Portugal, she comes back to a beloved homeland, a distant father, and a scandalous past. Traveling with Caterina are her cousin Jeremy Craddock, a young Englishman seeking a cure for his ill health, and her dear friend Harriet Brown, who is on the run from an arranged marriage. This unlikely trio arrives ian a Portugal rife with tension, for the country is at war with France, and Oporto, recently liberated, is a city in ruins and full of bitter memories. Caterina's hopes for happiness are initially frustrated, for her father seems determined to see her married or in a convent. Then the note arrives, a voice from the past that changes everything and send Caterina into the center of political and romantic intrigue. Drawn into the tangled web that binds the Portuguese and English communities together in an uneasy alliance, she discovers that no one is quite what he seems. Characterized by Jane Aiken Hodge's trademark blend of historical detail and adventure, Whispering tells the story of a young woman's search for truth and independence in a society that wants to deny her both.
Watch the wall, my darling
England lies under threat of invasion by Napoleon. Christina Tretton, a young American woman bound by a promise to her dying father, travels to the ancestral home to try to mend broken family ties. At Tretteign Grange she finds her ailing but still domineering grandfather, a featherbrained aunt, and a tall, dark and handsome cousin who may or may not be a spy -- but most certainly is a smuggler.
Last act
1991
E PAGET HAD SIX MONTHS TO LIVE. That's what the doctors told her. Even so, when she was offered the leading role in the newly discovered Beethoven opera Regulus to be debuted in the tiny European principality of Lissenberg, Anne knew it was the chance of a lifetime. Her lifetime. But someone wanted the opera to fail. Strange accidents had already caused chaos. Then murder brought a new terror. Who was behind all this? Certainly not Michael, the charming, handsome, Oxford-educated man to whom Anne was so attracted - the man who kneew too many things, and who somehow managed to be very close to Anne when she faced her greatest peril.