The Shuttle by Frances Hodgson Burnett was first published in 1907. Sir Nigel Anstruthers has travelled to New York from his impoverished estate in England, in the hope that he can bag a young and rich American wife, and he succeeds. Despite being arrogant and charmless, he manages to get Rosalie Vanderpoel to marry him, her father is a multi millionaire, but Rosalie is a quiet, meek young woman, the pretty one of the family, but she doesn’t have much in the way of brains, unlike her much younger sister Bettina. She can see right through Nigel and dislikes him intensely.

Roalie is whisked over to England by Nigel and she’s shocked at the poverty of Nigel’s estate, the place is falling apart. Nigel had expected to have control of Rosalie’s money when he married her, so he’s deeply disappointed when he realises that he doesn’t. Soon he’s abusing her and manipulating her and he even intercepts letters from her family in America, she’s completely isolated from them, they think that she has forgotten about them – and vice versa. Apparently this was something that the author had experienced herself in her second marriage.

This book is also about the differences between American and English society with the Americans tending to be held up as wonderfully ambitious go-getters, and the English mainly being so depressed that they can’t do anything for themselves. Time and time again the reader is hit over the head with the differences between the societies, it all got very wearing for me.

This book really should have been edited down, I found it quite tedious a lot of the time and I did think that it must have originally been published weekly in a magazine with the author being paid by the word, as Dickens was, but it seems that it wasn’t.

Apart from that I just couldn’t believe that very wealthy American parents would just wave goodbye to their beloved eldest daughter and not do anything about the lack of letters from her, for years and years. Thankfully Bettina rides to the rescue.