Leone Noel knows she is beautiful. She knows it the way a queen knows her throne: with certainty, with satisfaction, with an impatience that borders on indignation. Stuck on her uncle's farm, watching the seasons bleed into one another, she cannot forgive the world for placing such a woman in such a place. She was made for ballrooms, for lords, for adventure. Then Lord Lancelot Chandos appears, and suddenly the life she'd imagined Possible becomes dangerously, deliciously real. What follows is romance as the Victorians understood it: a whirlwind, a fever, a kind of beautiful madness. Chandos is charmed by her, and Leone is charmed by being charmed. But the novel is sharper than its premise suggests. Beneath the passion lies a genuine examination of a woman's ambition when the world tells her to be still. Can she want more without losing herself? Can love survive the gap between what she is and where she comes from? Written in 1900 by Charlotte M. Brame, this is escapist fiction at its most honest: a romance that knows exactly what it is and delivers it with verve. For readers who want their historical fiction to pulse with genuine longing.
