Wing of Azrael, Volume 1

Mona Caird was among the most radical voices of Victorian feminism, and The Wing of Azrael is her devastating indictment of a society that sold women into economic servitude through marriage. In this first volume, Viola Sedley faces a choice no young woman should have to make: her family teeters on the brink of financial ruin, and salvation lies in marrying Philip Dendraith, a wealthy nobleman whose charm conceals something far darker. Viola has witnessed his cruelty firsthand, and Harry Lancaster, a man of her own class who loves her, has warned her plainly against him. Yet tradition, duty, and her family's desperate circumstances bind her like chains. The title itself carries weight: Azrael is the angel of death, and in Victorian England, marriage often functioned as a slow erasure of a woman's self. This is a novel about the violence of impossible choices, and it remains essential reading for anyone who wants to understand why feminist writers of that era were so angry.