Adventures of an Ugly Girl

In Victorian England, where a woman's face is her fortune, our narrator has clearly drawn the short straw. Her beautiful older sister Belle never lets her forget it, delivering critiques of her unfortunate features with cheerful brutality. But beneath the daily indignities of being the 'ugly' sister lies a narrator whose wry observation and refusal to collapse under society's verdict make her far more compelling than any debutante with a perfect complexion. Corbett skewers the Victorian obsession with female appearance through a protagonist who refuses to let her face become her fate. What begins as comedy of manners becomes an quietly radical assertion of self-worth in a world determined to measure women by the mirror.