This revealing romp through proper society follows three different women who dare to defy Victorian standards. Can You Forgive Her? comically intertwines the stories of three very independent-minded women who each desires to decide her own fate in a world where love comes second to obedience and familial expectations set them apart from their peers. First and foremost is the spirited Alice Vavasor, whose indecision and repeated rejections of two...

Daughter of a modest country clergyman, Arabella Tallant is on her way to London when her carriage breaks down outside the hunting lodge of the wealthy Mr. Robert Beaumaris. Her pride stung when she overhears a remark of her host's, Arabella pretends to be an heiress, a pretense that deeply amuses the jaded Beau. To counter her white lie, Beaumaris launches her into high society and thereby subjects her to all kinds of fortune hunters and other embarrassments....

When Lady Ombersley agrees to take in her young niece, no one expects Sophy, who sweeps in and immediately takes the ton by storm. Sophy discovers that her aunt's family is in desperate need of her talent for setting everything right: Ceclia is in love with a poet, Charles has tyrannical tendencies that are being aggravated by his grim fiancee, her uncle is of no use at all, and the younger children are in desperate need of some fun and freedom. By...

"Calista Langley operates an exclusive "introduction" agency in Victorian London, catering to respectable ladies and gentlemen who find themselves alone in the world. But now, a dangerously obsessed individual has begun sending her trinkets and gifts suitable only for those in deepest mourning--a black mirror, a funeral wreath, a ring set with black jet stone. Each is engraved with her initials. Desperate for help and fearing that the police will...

Written as a sequel to "The Warden", this is the second book of the Barsetshire novels. Described as humorous, this wonderful novel that interweaves power, love, greed, and deceit in Barchester.

Achieving wealth and success through his savage ambitions, tycoon Rhys Winterborne resolves to marry shy, aristocratic Lady Helen Ravenel. In spite of her gentle upbringing, she responds to Rhys' seductions with her own unexpected passions.

"Written between 1873 and 1884 but not published until 1903, a year after Butler's death, his marvelously uninhibited satire savages Victorian bourgeois values as personified by multiple generations of the Pontifex family. A thinly veiled account of his own upbringing in the bosom of a God-fearing Christian family, Butler's scathingly funny depiction of the self-righteous hypocrisy underlying nineteenth-century domestic life was hailed by George Bernard...

In this Jane Austen-era romance, a handsome new estate owner discovers a mysterious woman living on his property and he's determined to uncover her secrets.

At Ware Castle, lady companion Emma Greyson ducks into a cupboard to avoid a lecher, and who should she meet hiding there, but the dashing Lord Edison Stokes. He is in the castle on a secret mission and together they solve a murder.

It was indisputably love at first sight. But Victoria Lyndon was merely the teenaged daughter of a vicar. . .while Robert Kemble was the dashing young earl of Macclesfield. Surely what their meddlesome fathers insisted must have been true-that he was a reckless seducer determined to destroy her innocence. . . and she was a shameless fortune hunter. So it most certainly was for the best when their plans to elope went hopelessly awry.

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