A Respectable Woman: A novel of Victorian London

Philippa Maclay is the daughter of a missionary who is left alone on the death of her father to make her way in the restricted society of mid nineteenth century London. Taking a post at a charity school in the East End she is torn between her love for her work and the girls in her care and her relationship with Major Kit Clevedon, a man to whom she can never be more than a diversion. Major Kit Clevedon is an aristocrat by birth and a soldier by choice and knows that he should stay away from the young school teacher he first met in the African bush but his attraction to the girl who lives in a different world to him is rapidly turning into something a lot more. Set against the luxury of Victorian salons and the poverty and teeming backstreets of the East End, A Respectable Woman is the story of a girl who must choose between propriety and love in a society which gave no second chances to a woman who lost her reputation.