This image is the cover for the book Hidden Hand

Hidden Hand

A feisty young orphan girl finds herself the heiress of a Virginia plantation in this nineteenth-century novel of high drama and perilous adventure.

Though she is an orphan, Capitola Black is nobody’s fool. To survive on the streets of New York, she works by disguising herself as a newsboy. But when the wealthy Major Warfield adopts her, she finds herself in a new world of adventure and danger at his Virginia plantation, Hurricane Hall. Named the sole heiress of Warfield’s fortune, Capitola is a young woman of great expectations—as long as she can survive the schemes of Warfield’s jealous family!

E.D.E.N. Southworth

E.D.E.N. Southworth (1819–1899) was born in Washington, DC, to Susannah Wailes and Charles LeCompte Nevitte, a Virginia merchant. In 1840 she married inventor Frederick H. Southworth. After the birth of their second child in 1844, Frederick abandoned his family in search of gold. Southworth began to write stories to support herself and her children, writing more than sixty novels in the latter part of the nineteenth century and becoming the most popular American novelist of her day.