A Long Weekend

By Susan Miller

Janet Fraser, a promising young pianist, visits her mother’s family home in the Yorkshire dales where she is transported back to the early nineteenth century and her ancestors mistake her for a daughter of the house who had eloped some years previously.

Janetta Thornley’s ‘reappearance’ receives a mixed reception: hostility from her mother, the autocratic Lady Gabriella; ambivalence from her brother William and resentment from debutante sister Sophie, but teenage Kate is pleased to see her again, as are most of the servants. Janet quickly forms a special friendship with Dorothea, William’s unhappy wife, who he is reputed to have poisoned.

In order to maintain her charade and a roof over her head, Janet has to cope with a very different lifestyle while remembering two cover stories: that put about by Lady Gabriella to save face and her own invention to account for the missing years. The prodigal daughter is relaunched into local society and blunders through a variety of situations.

Janet gradually adapts to her strange circumstances and settles into Georgian family life, but William eventually discovers she is an impostor and blackmails her into agreeing to marry his sister’s original suitor. Matters come to a head with a family tragedy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Susan Miller
• Release date: Jul 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311182227

Susan Miller

Susan M. Miller has been Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry in the School of Pharmacy at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) for over 30 years. Prior to UCSF, she held positions as an Assistant Professor and Lecturer of Biological Chemistry at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research focus and expertise lies in the areas of chemical biology and enzymology. Her team uses a variety of biochemical and biophysical tools to investigate protein structure/function questions spanning the range of elucidating novel aspects of catalysis in individual enzymes, to understanding how mutations influence flux through pathways of interacting proteins, to engineering novel microbial compounds using enzymes from ribosomally-synthesized peptide precursor pathways. She has mentored over 40 students, postdocs and staff researchers who currently hold positions in academia, biotech/pharma, the FDA, data science, patent law and other entrepreneurial organizations. She has co-authored and co-edited 5 books and published ~50 peer-reviewed papers. She has served as reviewer for grants at NIH, NSF, DOE and for numerous scientific journals, and is currently a member of the Editorial Review Board at the Journal of Biological Chemistry. Recently, Dr. Miller has served a leading role in the transformative design of the UCSF professional PharmD curriculum. She has co-directed the Therapeutic Sciences portion of the Foundations course and has served as co-Director developing and implementing a novel trio of inquiry elements in the new curriculum. Susan received her B.S. with high honors in Chemistry from the University of Missouri Columbia and her Ph.D. in chemistry with Professor Judith Klinman at the University of California Berkeley.