Makepeace Hedley Books in Order

The Makepeace Hedley books were published under Diana Norman’s own name, but they belong naturally with the rest of the Ariana Franklin shelf. They have the same appetite for history from the ground up, with politics, law, money, and family life all tangled together.

The series begins with Makepeace Burke, a Boston tavern keeper in the tense years before the American Revolution. In A Catch of Consequence, she rescues an English aristocrat from an angry crowd and falls in love with him, a choice that forces her out of one world and into another. She arrives in England carrying American anger, sharp instincts, and very little patience for aristocratic manners.

Makepeace does not glide through history. She crashes into it.

Across the trilogy, Norman uses Makepeace and her family to move between Boston, London, the English coast, prisons, smuggling villages, theatres, and revolutionary France. The story keeps returning to the word liberty, but it does not treat liberty as a clean slogan. For one person it may mean independence from Britain. For another it may mean escape from a brutal marriage, slavery, debt, prison, or the rules that keep women quiet.

Taking Liberties brings Makepeace into the world of captured Americans, British prisons, smugglers, and an unlikely friendship with Diana, Dowager Countess of Stacpoole. The contrast between the American outsider and the English aristocrat gives the book much of its bite. Both women have been boxed in by class and law, just in very different ways.

The final book, The Sparks Fly Upward, shifts more attention to Makepeace’s daughter Philippa. The French Revolution and the Reign of Terror pull the family story onto a wider and more dangerous stage. Philippa’s attempt to help the Marquis de Condorcet gives the book its urgent thread, while Makepeace remains tied to reform, anti-slavery work, and the messy business of standing up for people.

Readers should expect historical adventure with romance in it, not romance with history pasted around the edges. The Makepeace books are busy, warm, and sometimes harsh. They are about people trying to act decently when the age they live in keeps changing the rules.