A Daughter of Strife

London, the early 1700s. Anne Champion sits in a cold room above a chandler's shop, plaiting straw with numb fingers, waiting for word from her lover Sebastian, a surgeon with the armies abroad who promised to return and make her his wife. She has nothing but her hands, her hope, and the memory of his tenderness. When Richard Meadowes arrives with news that will dismantle her future, Anne discovers the world offers no safety net for women who love men who leave. Findlater renders the grinding poverty of London's working poor with unflinching precision: the landlords who pound on doors, the cold that settles into bones, the precarious arithmetic of survival without property or protection. But this is no sentimental tale of patient virtue rewarded. Anne's path leads through heartbreak and into the orbit of a man whose kindness may be another kind of trap. The novel asks what remains when romantic hope curdles into something more complicated: dependency, the hard choices available to women with nothing, the brutal mathematics of need. Findlater refuses easy consolations, offering instead a portrait of endurance that refuses to prettify suffering.