It's set in England and France in 1829, though political events enter only insofar as the chaos of the French Revolution and its associated wars has affected the characters' lives. The plot is about Jenny, an eighteen-year-old girl devoted to her aristocratic mother, who discovers that her mother is secretly meeting a strange man and becomes convinced that he is somehow a threat to her (the mother). The Aunt Beardie of the title is a childhood friend of her mother's, thought dead, who turns up unexpectedly around the time the strange man appears........