Over the Cliffs ~ Charlotte Chanter

As promised, here is the third of today's announcements (you can read the first one by clicking here and the second one by clicking here).

On 4 May, to accompany the release of two works by Gratiana Chanter, Nezu Press will publish a hardback edition of Over the Cliffs by Gratiana's mother, Charlotte Chanter, with a biographical essay by me. 

Here are the details:

Charlotte Chanter is best known as the author of Ferny Combes, a guide to collecting and identifying the ferns of Devonshire. Her only fiction novel, Over the Cliffs, was first published in two volumes by Smith, Elder and Co. in the autumn of 1860. The story is set on the coast of Devon at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It is a tale of murder, a stolen inheritance, smuggling, shipwrecks, blackmail, treachery, greed, plotting, counter-plotting… and love. There is even a hint of the supernatural in the form of a sighing ghost. Its fearless heroine is Gratiana Dawson, the daughter of a brutal bully who hates his children and is prone to violent paroxysms of passion. Motherless, forced to live under the roof of a tyrant, and the victim of one indignity after another, Gratiana refuses to surrender to the abusive men around her. Edward Mountjoy, the hero of the story, says of her, when speaking to Captain Douglas of the Royal Navy, ‘She has done things in her day that required from her more nerve than would be required of you in attacking an enemy.’ This edition includes a detailed biographical essay by Gina R. Collia, ‘Charlotte Chanter: Fearless Fern-Hunter of Devonshire’.

As with her daughter Gratiana, I'm going to be posting much more about this Devonshire writer in the days and weeks to come.

You can pre-order it directly from Nezu Press (Publisher shop: Click here). Or you can do so from the usual online retailers; the book will be showing up in all the usual places soon.

Nezu Press, 4 May 2024.
978-1-917113-00-7.
Hardback with dust jacket, 460 pages.