Regiment of Women

At a private girls' school in Edwardian England, Clare Hartill rules with quiet intensity. She's the real power behind the institution, beloved by students who submit to her strict but magnetic authority. Then nineteen-year-old Alwynne Durand arrives, and something shifts. The two women become inseparable, their bond deepening during summer travels abroad. But Elsbeth Loveday, Alwynne's elderly guardian, watches with growing unease as Hartill's influence over her ward intensifies. What begins as professional respect becomes something rawer, more possessive. These three women circle each other in a tense dance of devotion and rivalry, each fighting to be the dominant presence in Alwynne's life. Written in 1919, when any overt acknowledgment of lesbian relationships was legally impossible, Dane crafted something revolutionary: a novel that speaks through implication, where a lingering touch or a jealous glance carries the weight of forbidden desire. It captures a specific historical moment when women had new freedoms after the Great War but still lived under rigid codes of respectability, finding ways to love and yearn that the world would not name.