Her Evil Genius: Or, Within Love's Call

Two girls. One convent. A bond that will shape their lives forever. Andria Heathcote and Beryl Corselas share a last afternoon before Andria leaves to become a governess, departing the only home the orphaned Beryl has ever known. Inside those stone walls, Beryl has endured years of cruelty from Sister Felicitas, her spirit worn down to embers. When Andria goes, something breaks in the girl left behind. Years later, both women have been shattered by the world's indifference. Beryl flees to London, hungry and desperate, until the city drives her to the very edge. Andria, now hiding under a different name, has known betrayal in love and the humiliation of poverty. Yet somehow their paths converge again, at a mysterious house where a young ward waits, and old secrets threaten to surface. This is a novel about what survival costs: the friendships that sustain us, the institutions that fail us, and the way trauma echoes across years and distances. For readers who cherish dark Victorian narratives of female endurance, of women who fall and rise and fall again, who find in each other the only light in a brutal world.