A Tale of False Fortunes
Enchi Fumiko

Set in Japan at the end of the tenth century, A Tale of False Fortunes (Namamiko monogatari) tells the story of Teishi, daughter of Fujiwara regent Michitaka, who is married as a girl to the young Emperor Ichijo. When Michitaka dies, power shifts within the family: the dowager Empress prefers his brothers to his sons and the new regent Michinaga wants his own daughter to be empress. He uses devious means (including false spirit mediums) to try to undermine Teishi's position, and lady-in-waiting Kureha and her lover, secretary of police Yukikuni, are caught up in his machinations.

The Grand Sophy
Georgette Heyer

My favourite among Georgette Heyer's thirty-odd Regency romances, The Grand Sophy has the most outrageously assertive heroine of them all. Twenty year old Sophy is the daughter of a widely-travelled diplomat, whom she calls "Sir Horace" and whose household she has managed since her mother died. When he is sent to Brazil in the spring of 1816, Sophy comes to London to stay with her aunt and cousins. She finds Cecilia infatuated with an unexceptionable but impractical poet, Hubert with money problems, and eldest cousin Charles, in charge of the household finances on account of an inheritance and his father's gambling debts, engaged to the strait-laced and ultra-respectable Miss Wraxton. Setting about her like a general, Sophy undertakes to fix all their problems, marshalling her resources but letting nothing stand in her way when she strikes.