---
title: Nina de Gramont's Peregrine Hill Is Built on Her Great-Grandmother's Forced Teenage Marriage
description: Peregrine Hill, Nina de Gramont's Gilded Age novel out 10th November, draws on her great-grandmother's forced marriage. Plot, reviews and where to buy.
author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
date: 2026-11-13T06:44:11.456Z
updated: 2026-11-13T06:44:11.470Z
canonical: https://richbooksmagazine.com/article/nina-de-gramont-s-peregrine-hill-is-built-on-her-great-grandmother-s-forced-teenage-marriage
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/rich-books-peregrine-hill-card-16x9.webp
categories: Fiction
content_type: News
publication: Rich Books
schema_type: Article
about:
  - type: Person
    name: Nina de Gramont
    description: American novelist, author of The Christie Affair and Peregrine Hill.
    jobTitle: Novelist
---

### Book: Peregrine Hill
By Nina de Gramont

Gilded Age New York. Isabelle Bishop, widowed by a shipwreck that also took three of her children, pushes her daughter Mariah into marriage with a wealthy man who holds a scandal over her. Inside her new home, Mariah and her ambitious maid Hetty find their own routes to independence, between Manhattan and the Rhode Island coast.

[Waterstones](https://www.waterstones.com/books/search/term/peregrine+hill+nina+de+gramont)

When Nina de Gramont's great-grandmother, Dona Maria, was a teenager, she was married off to a 57-year-old man who had first come to court her mother. *Peregrine Hill*, published by Simon & Schuster on 10th November, carries that family story into Gilded Age New York and follows a mother and daughter as they bargain for survival in a city run by money and men.

## A Shipwreck at the Turn of the Century

The novel opens as the Bishops prepare to see in 1900 at their lake house in Maine. Isabelle Bishop falls ill with a fever and stays behind in New York with her eldest daughter, Mariah. The ship carrying her husband, Daniel, and their three other children goes down in a storm.

Isabelle is left with Mariah, her elderly mother and no money to protect them. She still believes in love, but she decides a wealthy marriage is the only way to keep the family together. John Whitten, one of the richest men in New York and a widower in need of an heir, starts calling at the house. His interest turns out to be in eighteen-year-old Mariah, who is still reeling from a romantic scandal the family has worked hard to bury. Whitten learns the secret and makes his terms plain: Mariah marries him, or the city hears everything. Isabelle pushes her daughter into the match, knowing what it may cost her.

## Mariah and Hetty at Peregrine Hill

Married life becomes a gilded cage for Mariah, and the story moves from the parlours of Manhattan to the windswept cliffs of Rhode Island. Mariah starts to write. Her maid, Hetty, sharp and ambitious, becomes her editor and her closest ally, and the two women risk everything to win some control over their own lives.

That partnership gives the book its pulse. The novelist Nita Prose sees the bond between a wealthy young wife and a low-born maid, joined by a shared literary ambition, as the heart of the story. Hetty wants independence as badly as Mariah does, and the pages they work on together become the one place where either of them makes the rules.

## Reviews for Peregrine Hill

The publisher places the novel in the tradition of Edith Wharton and the Brontë sisters. Library Journal gave it a starred review and recommended it to fans of the television drama *The Gilded Age*. Kirkus called it 'a delicious historical melodrama', and Publishers Weekly praised it as a story of resilience. The Nerd Daily gave it nine out of ten and singled out prose that reads smoothly while staying true to the period.

Isabelle's own story also takes a turn nobody sees coming, and reviewers have kept it to themselves. Do the same if you lend the book to a friend.

## Who Will Love Peregrine Hill

If *The Christie Affair*, de Gramont's 2022 Reese's Book Club pick about Agatha Christie's eleven-day disappearance, kept you up at night, you will find the same writer here with even higher stakes. If you reread *The House of Mirth* every few years, *Peregrine Hill* belongs on your bedside table this winter. The novel runs to 320 pages and is out now in hardback, ebook and audio, with the audiobook read by Carlotta Brentan. Italian readers already have it too, as *Le signore di Peregrine Hill* from Neri Pozza.

Dona Maria's marriage was decided for her more than a century ago. In *Peregrine Hill*, her great-granddaughter gives that girl a pen, a co-conspirator and a door out, and lets you watch her walk through it.

## Buy Peregrine Hill

[Peregrine Hill on Waterstones](https://www.waterstones.com/books/search/term/peregrine+hill+nina+de+gramont) / [Barnes & Noble](https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/peregrine-hill-nina-de-gramont/1149526052)