A book about a girl called Angela (or Angel)

[Lenka]

Looking for a book (really a series of books) I read years ago about a girl called Angela (I think her nickname was Angel) that grows up with (whom she believes to be) her father and her stepmother (her mother dies at childbirth). Her father sells her for adoption and her adoptive parents abuse her (boiling baths etc). Somehow she ends up with her (real) grandparents who are wealthy and live in a grand house. They send her to school and look after her. Her grandmother is obsessed with trying to look young and grandfather is a bit off-ish. By a chance she meets her grandfather's very much younger brother or her mother's brother (I can't remember exactly) who is a bit of an introvert and lives in a cottage in the grounds of the grand house. They fall in love even though they know it's not right. Somehow it transpires that her grandfather is really her father as he raped her mother who got pregnant, run off and married the man Angela believed was her father. The plot gets more tangled as it goes on but this is what I can recall.

I think the story was based in mid-south US (most likely a fiction)

[Lobstergirl, au gratin]

What age reader?
Cover?
Author's gender?

[Lenka]

Lobstergirl wrote: "What age reader?
Cover?
Author's gender?"

Hi Lobstergirl. Thank you for replying. I read the books when I was a teenager (late 90s- early 2000s) I remember they were paperback but cannot remember what was on the cover and the author was a female ( i think)

[Juels]

This is the Heaven series by V.C. Andrews.

Heaven
Dark Angel
Fallen Hearts
Web of Dreams
Gates of Paradise