Trevelyan Family Books in Order

The Trevelyan Family books are part of Loretta Chase's earliest run of traditional Regencies, and they show how quickly she understood the pleasures of the form. These are shorter, lighter novels than her later historical romances, but they already have what many readers come for: quick banter, well-bred troublemakers, and heroines who notice far more than the people around them realize.

The first book, Isabella, centers on Isabella Latham, a woman who has seen enough Seasons to be treated as safely unmarriageable. She arrives in London as a chaperone and suddenly finds herself in the middle of fashionable attention, family complications, and brewing scandal. The setting matters here. The ballrooms, calls, and whispered judgments of the ton create the pressure that makes every glance and misstep count.

The Trevelyan connection gives the pair of books its backbone. Handsome, troublesome Basil Trevelyan is part of the first novel's social tangle, and The English Witch moves him to the front. There the story widens beyond London society. Alexandra Ashmore is pushed toward an unwanted match, then swept into a far more dangerous adventure when she is kidnapped abroad and Basil becomes her rescuer.

Same family, different mood.

That shift is what makes this little two-book sequence fun. Isabella leans more toward drawing-room comedy and romantic confusion. The English Witch keeps the wit but adds travel, peril, and a stronger sense that the world outside polite society can be strange, unruly, and genuinely risky. Chase was already interested in using Regency romance for more than one kind of story.

Because these were written as traditional Regencies, the tension comes less from explicit passion than from timing, misunderstanding, and the social cost of one wrong move. That makes the emotional sparring stand out even more. If you want to see Chase early in her career, before the later, bigger books but already playing with sharp heroines, reckless noblemen, and a wider European backdrop, the Trevelyan Family novels are a very good place to look.