Showing titles in Victorian

The Marquess of Greymoor has possessed a great many titles in his life, but there is none he despises more than the one he unexpectedly inherited as a lad. Call him what you like, Grey has never fit the societal mold. Instead, he is unabashedly determined to live by his own set of rules. Which is why, when a mysterious and lovely housekeeper attracts his attention, he makes her the offer of a lifetime: one month of sin with him in return for a tidy fortune.

Liverpool, 1863. Maud Linklater's life as a housemaid changes forever the day she takes poor little injured chimney sweep Alfie to hospital. Helping to care for him on the ward, Maud is unexpectedly offered a place as a trainee at the newly opened nursing school run by Ada Houston. Maud loves her new role and throws herself wholeheartedly into the busy, exhausting experience of living and working at the hospital. And she has a lot of fun along the way once she befriends fellow trainees, including the sweet Alice and chatterbox Edie.

Rescued by ruin, American heiress Daisy Vanreid is desperate to avoid marriage to the aging aristocrat her abusive father chose for her. She'll do anything, even entrap the notorious Duke of Trent into marriage, to escape her fate. Losing her heart to her handsome husband after the wedding isn't part of the plan. Nothing is as it seems.

When Luke McCutcheon finds Faith Brown about to give birth in her rickety wagon, his first instincts are to ride for help. Instead, he stays and delivers a beautiful baby girl. Unable to leave the pretty young widow and her little son and newborn unprotected in the Montana wilderness, he brings them along on his family's cattle drive, to the absolute delight of the other friendly cowboys.

There aren't many young ladies who'd be eager to accept a governess position with wild twin boys in a lonely castle deep in the Oxfordshire countryside, but Helena Templeton has never been much like other young ladies. She's just settled into her new post when the boys' father, the rakish Earl of Hawke, returns home unexpectedly, half-dressed and fleeing his latest London scandal.

Will Hart, the duke of Ashmore, is everything his father was not: scrupulously honest, forbidding, and apparently joyless. As a duke, he’s a catch, but as a grumpy stick-in-the mud, no lady knows quite how to catch his eye. When his sisters concoct a plan for him to visit a run-down family property in Cornwall, he reluctantly agrees, hoping it will be a chance for him to rediscover the carefree man he once was.

Perpetually unattached Lady Cassia McQuoid has accepted her fate as a spinster. But how can she be expected to lead a life confined to drawing rooms and royal balls when there’s a vast, exciting world to explore? Cassia can find but one solution: she masquerades as a thrill-seeking lad and stows away on a ship bound for open waters. Adventure awaits. So does notorious privateer Nathaniel Ellsby.

Beatrice was sent away from home to reform her spiteful behavior, and Vernon was hurt and determined to forgo love. Lord Vernon decides to move on with an unemotional marriage of convenience. Lady Beatrice finds herself reduced from a Duke’s daughter to a life of service in Scotland, trying to learn the ways of the less privileged. Will the two find their way back together again? Or will Vernon choose another bride first? Will Beatrice be able to humble herself and reform her shrewish spoiled ways?

Eliza Wild has come a long way from her hungry childhood days in a rented miner's cottage on Pit Lane on the outskirts of Leeds. Her sewing skills have enabled her to go into business with a wealthy patron and to give her young niece, Victoria, a better life than she and her sister, Mary-Anne, ever dreamed of. There's also Eliza's sweetheart, Tom, who is determined to marry her, but having worked so hard to get to where she is, will Eliza take a chance on love when it means she might lose everything she has ever worked for?

Stacie - Lady Eustacia Cavanaugh - is adamant marriage is not for her. Wealthy and well-born, she needs for nothing, and with marriage off the table, to give her life purpose, she embarks on a plan to further the careers of emerging local musicians by introducing them to the ton via a series of musical evenings. Yet despite her noble status, Stacie requires a musical lure to tempt the haut ton to her events, and only one musician commands sufficient cachet - the reclusive and notoriously reluctant Marquess of Albury.

An immediate success when it was first published in 1874, Thomas Hardy's "pastoral tale" of the wilful and capricious Bathsheba Everdene, her three suitors, the faithful shepherd Gabriel Oak, the lonely widower Farmer Boldwood, and the dashing but faithless Sergeant Troy, and the tragic consequence of her eventual choice remains one of the most enduring and popular English novels.

As a young girl, Georgana Woodall dreamed of beautiful dresses, fancy balls, and falling in love. However, when her mother dies, she cannot face a future under the guardianship of her abusive grandmother and instead chooses to join her father on his ship disguised as his cabin boy, “George”. Lieutenant Dominic Peyton has no time in his life for love, not with his dedication to His Majesty’s Royal Navy claiming his full attention. When he sees the captain’s cabin boy being harassed by the crew, he immediately puts a stop to it and takes the “boy” under his wing.

Charles Humphrey, the Earl of Lonsdale, is infamous for his seductions. With laughing, gray eyes and a halo of blond hair, he's every woman's wicked dream. Beneath that devil-may-care grin he has a painful past that has made him sure love was not for him, even as the rest of his friends, the members of the League of Rogues, settle down in wedded bliss. When he accidentally rescues a mysterious beauty with eyes as haunted as his own and shares one life-changing kiss with her, she vanishes in the night. Charles vows to find this angel who might yet save his soul.

When Evie McKnight slams into Jamie Mackenzie on a quay on Southampton, she flashes back to the day she accidentally knocked him into the river Cam. When she fished him out, he shocked her with a searing, bold kiss before walking away in a wet shirt and kilt. Evie has no business reveling in memories of Jamie then and the nearness of him now - she is betrothed to a respectable man from a respectable and wealthy family. But Jamie appears everywhere in London, assisting Evie and her sisters, becoming friends with her fiancé, and agreeing to be drawn into the heist Evie has planned.

Stealing a code book from an enemy spy should be easy for someone like Frederica Vale. As the plain-looking older sister, she's practically invisible at social events. Never mind that she has no experience as a spy or that the codebook rests in the possession of one of the most powerful men in England. Freddie has no choice - she's desperate to save her young sister from the lecherous intentions of their guardian and recovering the book is her only option.

When Tilly Thompson, a girl from the canal, is caught stealing a pie from the terrace of The Imperial Hotel, Athelstone, the intervention of Captain Charles Thackery saves her from prison. Tilly soon finds out the real reason for the rescue. With the captain, Tilly sees life away from the poverty and hardships of the waterways, but his favor stirs up jealousy and hatred among the hotel staff, especially Freddie, the stable boy who harbors desires of his own.

Blackmailed by his sister into giving a Christmas house party to celebrate her recent marriage, Edward Greyston, Marquess of Winterbourne, is quite certain the next few days will be an utter nightmare. Nightmares, however, are something Edward is all too familiar with. After the bloody battle of Waterloo, he has returned from the war a changed man, full of rage and guilt. Suspecting one of his house guests, the bluestocking Belinda Holbrook is about to trap unsuspecting and gullible Lord Nibley into marriage, he goes to warn him, only to get caught himself.

USA Today best-selling author and RITA Award winner Jennifer Ashley pens heart-pounding tales that keep listeners spellbound with torrid romance and finely crafted intrigue. Juliana St. John faces the ultimate mortification when she's stood up on her wedding day. But then fate places her face-to-face with her first love, Elliot McBride, and she finds herself falling for her half-mad former paramour.

Suspended from his work as an agent for the Crown, Griffin, Duke of Strathmore, exists under a dark cloud of suspicion for crimes he didn’t commit. He’s on a desperate race to clear his name by any means until a grave error lands him under house arrest with the last sort of distraction he needs.

One abandoned, one unfinished, these short works show Austen equally at home with romance (a widowed clergyman with four daughters must needs be in search of a husband or two in The Watsons) and with social change (a new, commercial seaside resort in Sanditon). Typically touching, funny, charming and sharp.