My Pretty Maid; Or, Liane Lester

Liane Lester is a seamstress in a world that measures a woman's worth in coin, not character. Her grandmother's cruelty has carved her into something quiet and resilient, a beautiful creature trapped in the straitjacket of poverty. When Jesse Devereaux stumbles into her life, mistaking her for someone worthy of rescue, she glimpses a different existence, one where she might be seen, valued, desired. But class is a gulf as wide as any ocean, and Jesse moves in worlds where a seamstress is invisible unless she's saving him from a drunk in a darkened alley. Mrs. Miller's 1890s romance is less froth than it first appears: it's a sharp critique of Victorian society's brutal arithmetic of worth, wrapped in the conventions of the genre. The result pulses with unspoken longing, the ache of wanting what society insists you cannot have. It's for readers who savor the slow burn of impossible love, who root for the pretty maid in pretty dresses to find her way out of the gutter.