YMMV / Cavendon Hall

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Was Richard Torbett telling the truth about only wanting to show Dulcie the bluebells? Given his (known, such as raping Daphne and suspected, such as setting the stable on fire and peeping in on Gordon and Peggy) actions earlier in the book, it would hardly be out of character for him to want to kidnap, rape, and possibly murder a six-year-old, and people in fear of their lives are often willing to say whatever they think will save themselves. On the other hand, it takes a special kind of evil to want to hurt a six-year-old like that.
• Toy Ship: Cecily and Michael, who are 12 and 14, respectively, when they begin to have feelings for each other.
• Values Dissonance: Nowadays, Daphne would not have to marry just because she got pregnant. Nor would she marry a man in his early 30s when she herself is still in her teens. Either of those would raise some red flags in modern society.
• The Woobie: Julian Torbett, Daphne Ingham, and Michael Ingham.
  • Julian Torbett is Daphne's childhood friend, and has apparently been in love with her for years. He is killed while on a horseback ride with his fiancee (not Daphne) after breaking his spinal cord. The reason he's died? Someone, possibly his own brother, was shooting at something in the woods they were riding in. Oh, and then he's falsely accused of raping said childhood friend, when he cannot even defend himself against these charges.
  • Daphne Ingham. The older brother of abovementioned childhood friend was so incensed that she did not love him that he raped her, and when she found out who it was, threatened to kill her mother and youngest sister if she told anyone. Then she lived in fear for the next two months before falling pregnant at age 17, making her essentially unmarriageable. She eventually finds love with an older cousin, but her own older sister torments her, possibly because she wasn't allowed to be a godmother to said child. Meanwhile, her youngest sister is nearly kidnapped and raped by the same man, and then her mother leaves, not returning again until Michael's engagement party six years later. During World War I, her husband is called into duty right as she finds out she's pregnant with her second child. He survives, but that must have still been a trying time.
  • Michael is the least Woobie-ish of all of these, but it's still difficult for him. He can't sign up for war because of his bad eyesight, and then his older brother and the heir to the family titles and lands is killed in the line of duty, thereby leaving all the duties to him. Although he is in love with his childhood friend, Cecily, they can never be together because he must marry an aristocrat.