Her Fairy Prince

The title is the trap. Gertrude Warden's 1895 novel dissects the ugly economics hidden beneath Victorian romance when Wallace Armstrong, a young man ruined by debt and past disgrace, reunites with Captain Garth in Boulogne. Armstrong sees salvation in Garth's innocent daughter Laline, a marriage that could restore his fortune and win back his wealthy uncle's favor. But the arrangement is cold calculation for Armstrong, escape from gambling debts for Garth, and for Laline, the beginning of her life with a man she believes is her fairy prince. She knows nothing of the transaction happening around her, nothing of the men trading her future like currency. Warden's sharp, uncomfortable novel exposes how society dresses up economic exploitation as fairy tale, how women become collateral in men's desperate games, and how respectability masks the most brutal compromises. It's a quietly savage critique of Victorian marriage as marketplace, wrapped in the language of romance.