Alice, or the Mysteries — Book 03
1838
Lord Lumley Vargrave is a man with a plan and a problem: debts that threaten to swallow him whole. His solution is elegant in its coldness: marry Evelyn Cameron, a wealthy heiress whose fortune will restore his political ambitions. But Victorian society is a viper pit, and Vargrave's rivals circle as his past sins cast long shadows. Bulwer-Lytton, the era's most prolific novelist, constructed a protagonist who is impossible to admire yet impossible to look away from. This is a novel about the price of respectability, the mathematics of love in high society, and the quiet violence of ambition. It prefigured the psychological sensation novels of the 1860s and stands as a dark mirror to the Victorian ideal of the self-made man.
