Emily Fox-Seton: Being the Making of a Marchioness and the Methods of Lady Walderhurst

What makes this book matter: it's Cinderella for readers who grew up. Emily Fox-Seton is not a girl of seventeen but a woman of thirty-something, with lined hands and a carefully maintained wardrobe bought from her modest earnings. She is the one everyone leans on but no one thinks to invite to dinner, until suddenly they do. Living in a tiny London apartment on a meager income, Emily works as an unofficial helper to the well-connected Lady Maria Bayne, finding contentment in small acts of service and the little pleasures of life. When an invitation to Mallowe Court arrives, a country house party among the aristocracy, it represents everything her quiet life is not. What follows is a fairy tale for readers tired of fairy tales, where kindness itself becomes a form of power, and the question is not whether a woman deserves her happy ending but whether happiness can survive the world that grants it. The sequel, "The Methods of Lady Walderhurst," follows her navigating the complexities of married life among the upper classes.