Tides of War

 
From the publishers:
Tides of War opens in England with the recently married, charmingly unconventional Harriet (Harry) preparing to say goodbye to her husband James as he leaves to join the Duke of Wellington's troops in Spain in the company of his friend, a young pioneering doctor.
 
Harry and James's interwoven stories of love and betrayal propel this novel as it moves between Regency London on the cusp of modernity – a city in love with science, the machine, money – and the shocking violence of war in Spain. Tillyard explores not only the affects of war on the men at the front but also the freedoms it offers the women left behind. As Harry befriends the older and protective Kitty, Lady Wellington, her life begins to change in unexpected ways. Meanwhile, James is seduced by the violence of war, and then by love in Seville.
 
As the novel moves between war and peace, Spain and London, its large cast of characters includes the serial adulterer and war hero the Duke of Wellington, and the émigrés Nathan Rothschild and Frederic Winsor who will usher in the future, creating a world brightly lit by gaslight where credit and financial speculation rule.
 
Stella Tillyard has taught at Harvard and UCLA, and was also visiting scholar at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at Queen Mary, University of London, where she taught the history and practice of biography. Her previous books include The Impact of Modernism (1987), Aristocrats (a biography of four eighteenth-century sisters published in 1994 which won the History Today Award, the Fawcett Prize, and the Meilleur Livre Etranger), Citizen Lord, the life of Lord Edward Fitzgerald (1998), and A Royal Affair, about George III and his siblings (2006). Tides of War is her first novel.