Bright Captivity

A new edition of the New York Times best seller, presented by Turner Publishing

The St. Simons Trilogy. . . the Florida Trilogy. . . the Savannah Quartet. . . For twenty-five years Eugenia Price has captivated millions of readers with her spellbinding historical sagas. Now, with Bright Captivity, the first volume of her eagerly awaited Georgia Trilogy, she returns for her most powerful and unforgettable story to the richness and color of life on Georgia's St. Simons Island.

The story begins as the War of 1812 is in its final days. Anne Couper, the spirited young daughter of a prominent St. Simons family, is attending a house party at Dungeness, an estate on nearby Cumberland Island, when a contingent of British Royal Marines, on a mission to free slaves, invades the island. They make Dungeness their headquarters, and all its occupants, including Anne Couper, become their captives. From the moment Anne meets British lieutenant John Fraser, she knows her once-secure life as the sheltered only daughter of planter John Couper will never be the same. It isn't. Within a year of their initial separation at the end of Britain's war with the United States, John Fraser, no longer needed by the Royal Marines because his country has finally defeated Napoleon, returns to Georgia to make Anne his wife.

Eugenia Price has created her most complex and believable characters in John and Anne, who, in 1816, are caught in much the same tangled dilemma experienced today by any young couple attempting to stretch their love to cover almost contradictory backgrounds.

The couple must now decide where to live: at Cannon's Point, Anne's beloved family plantation in Georgia, or in London, where John can't bring himself to relinquish the only life where he feels at home-as an officer in the Royal Marines. While Anne and John struggle with their decision, Ms. Price takes her readers on a moving journey from war-torn Georgia to the shores of England-and even to Abbotsford, Scotland, the country home of Sir Walter Scott.

Written in Ms. Price's signature style-a seamless blend of keen imagination, meticulous research, and narrative artistry-Bright Captivity will capture the hearts and minds of new readers and devoted fans alike.

Eugenia Price, 79, Romance Novelist, Dies

By Robert McG. Thomas Jr., May 30, 1996, The New York Times

Eugenia Price, who turned a chance visit to coastal Georgia into a career as the South's most popular writer of antebellum romantic fiction, died on Tuesday at a hospital in Brunswick, Ga., not far from her home in St. Simons, the island she made famous through a series of novels. She was 79.

Her companion, Joyce Blackburn, said the cause was congestive heart failure.

Her hoop-skirted heroines tended to be too unremittingly beautiful, her handsome heroes a shade too dashing and their problems a bit too easily solved for Ms. Price to have won serious literary acclaim. But then again, how many acclaimed authors sell more than 40 million books in 18 languages?

That Ms. Price did just that was a tribute both to her ability as a storyteller and her knack for recreating a bygone era with such compelling and authentic historic detail that, according to the St. Simons's Chamber of Commerce, a substantial majority of the thousands of tourists who visit the island each year come there specifically to scout out the houses, marshes and other locales she used in her novels, not to mention the headstones of the actual people she brought back to life as fictional characters.

Ms. Price, a dentist's daughter from Charleston, W.Va., was a precocious student who entered Ohio University at 16 and later studied dentistry at Northwestern University before dropping out of school to pursue a writing career.

Those familiar with the intensely romantic themes of her fiction would not be surprised that she began her career writing soap operas, initially in Chicago and later in New York and Cincinnati, the headquarters of Procter & Gamble.

An intense conversion to Christianity in the late 1940's altered the course of her life and of her writing. Abandoning soap operas, she began turning out inspirational books -- among them Discoveries, Beloved World, and The Eugenia Price Treasury of Faith -- that won her a wide following long before she turned to fiction.Indeed, it was while on a tour in 1960 to promote one of her two dozen inspirational titles that she and Ms. Blackburn, who had been living in Chicago, happened to stop off in St. Simons and were so enchanted by the beauty and ambiance of the place that they decided they never wanted to leave.It was a measure of their immediate and intense devotion to the island that the two women bought cemetery plots there before they built the house they named Dodge after the real St. Simons clergyman who, with his two wives, became the focus of Ms. Price's first novels, Lighthouse, New Moon Rising, and Beloved Invader.

Those books were such a succcess that she wrote a Florida Trilogy and a Savannah Quartet before a turning out a final Georgia Trilogy, whose return to the familiar St. Simons settings helped propel the first book of the final series, Bright Captivity (1991), to The New York Times best-seller list. The third, Beauty from Ashes (1995), was also a best seller. Her last book, The Waiting Time, is to be published next year by Doubleday.

Ms. Blackburn, a writer who subsumed her own career to serve as Ms. Price's live-in editor, is her only survivor.