Some years ago I designed a winter survival kit for subzero days indoors. If we’d had a fireplace, we’d have burned fragrant apple wood or beech, but instead we huddled under blankets and sipped hot beverages. We also read many flamboyant old books, most of them novels. My pile of books is ready for the weekend.

This week I read a Victorian page-turner, Mrs. Henry Wood’s Lord Oakburn’s Daughters (1864), the most absorbing book I’ve read this year. You may know the prolific Wood’s best-selling sensation novel, East Lynne, which sold two and a half million copies in 1861. But I find Lord Oakburn’s Daughters even more intriguing.

In this double mystery, a young woman named Mrs. Crane gives birth to a premature baby a few hours after her mysterious arrival in South Wannock. Two rival doctors attend her, and one apparently slips poison into her medicine. The slick Mr. Carlton, the new doctor in town, accuses the well-established Mr. Stephen Grey of accidentally adding the ingredient. Mr. Grey insists that he did not.

What was the motive of the murder? Who was Mrs. Crane?

Plot and characters are interwoven in this entertaining, rambling novel. We are equally concerned with the case of the missing Clarice Chesney, who ran away to become a governess. The impoverished Chesney family lives in South Wannock, and it has been a year since Jane Chesney heard from Clarice. Jane is the dutiful daughter who manages the Chesney household and has a staunch sense of decorum; her beautiful, selfish younger sister Laura has clandestine “dates” with the wrong man; and Lucy, Jane’s pet, is in the background. After their father inherits the title of Lord Oakburn, they move to London, where Jane searches for clues to the disappearance of Clarice. There are maddeningly few, but she puts them together – with help from others and many coincidences.

I can think of no governess characters quite like Mrs. Henry Wood’s. Lord Oakburn marries his daughter Lucy’s governess, which upsets Jane, and this event is a gloss on the less happy fate of the other governess in Lord Oakburn’s Daughters. In other governess books, there is usually a happy ending. In 19th-century governess lit, we all know Jane Eyre, Miss Taylor in Emma, and Agnes Grey in Agnes Grey. Of these three, only Agnes hated her job, but like the other two, she met her husband while educating disrespectful girls. I’m sure I have come across governesses in 20th-century lit, but can only think of Angela Thirkell’s comical novels and Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga. Jolyon married the governess.

And so what is the answer for women in Mrs. Henry Wood’s novel? Integrity, intelligence, and an income.