Matilda is an 1825 novel by the British writer and politician Lord Normanby, originally published in two volumes.
[1] It was part of the emerging, popular genre of silver fork novels that focused on the fashionable British upper classes in the later Regency era, and was his first published work.
Lady Holland said "it is for the first fifty pages full of wit and observation on manners and society, and then becomes commonplace and like any trashy, sentimental novel".
While Augustus is in Europe, the newspaper John Bull scurrilously reports he has begun living with an Italian woman.
Feeling betrayed, Matilda is persuaded by her guardian to marry a wealthy self-made merchant from Manchester who has recently acquired a baronetcy.