Jeff Turner), but I never felt like this was a morality tale*. Miranda has to change in order to find happiness with the true hero of the book (the selfless Dr. I was rooting for her to get what she wanted from the very first.

But she is an engrossing main character, perhaps in part because she is so unlike the smarter, wiser, less shallow heroines of better novels. Miranda is no Jane Eyre-she is silly, selfish, and bends to Nicholas's every whim. And yet, he is still as powerful and handsome as ever, and he's still quite attractive to the heroine, which makes the story all the more horrifying. This is like a wonderfully dark and twisted version of Jane Eyre or Rebecca, in which the remote older gentleman the heroine falls in love with is actually a terrifying villain. And it is here that the story takes a turn, because far from a meeting of minds or a storybook ending, Miranda's triumphant wedding rapidly becomes a nightmare.

After Johanna dies, he immediately proposes to Miranda. Nicholas is haunted by his first wife, who cannot give him the son he craves, and by Miranda's beauty. It is ruled by the autocratic Nicholas Van Ryn, who is so handsome, powerful, cultured that Miranda falls for him immediately. When a distant cousin invites her to act as companion to his young daughter, she leaps at the chance and soon arrives at the beautiful gothic mansion of Dragonwyck. Miranda Wells is too dainty and flighty to fit in with her hard working, puritanical farming family.

Dragonwyck seton