Ancestral Virgins

"There was a pain in her chest, a numbness she could feel all down her left side to her fingertips. Behind the closed doors of the bedrooms, there were muffled voices, people dressing on a summer's evening, looking forward to nothing more than a good dinner, nothing that would rip their lives into two halves like a long, jagged seam."Set just before the First World War in London and Nottinghamshire, Ancestral Virgins (Part One) is Downton Abbey with a harder edge and a more shocking secret. Lady Celia Mapperley, young, innocent, and unmarried, is emerging from her protected childhood into a world that seems to hold no place for her. Her mother is pushing her to marry the rich industrialist George Ingham, but Celia is reluctant. Though she is told nothing but hints and whispers, she's both intrigued and repulsed by the mystery of what happens in the dark between a bride and her husband. Feeling ill at ease in every situation, from London's society balls to its suffrage meetings, she despairs of ever finding what will make her truly happy. When a new and wholly unexpected lover comes along, Celia learns the devastating power of desire and is thrust into a scandal so damning it could cost her everything she's ever known.Ancestral Virgins will appeal to fans of Sarah Waters and Kate Atkinson and to anyone enthralled by period dramas in film and television.

"What has possessed her to try to shake Lady Celia's hand? Shouldn't she have curtseyed? Do women still curtsey? May's been away for so long now, she's got city ways. She tries to hide her surprise as Lady Celia takes her proffered hand. Close up, she's as sleek as a seal in her houndstooth suit and hat that fits close to her head like a helmet. There's something intense about her stance as she holds the long stick of her cigarette between two fingers. What made her breach the close, dead air of the waiting room to speak to two anxious, hungry strangers fraying at the seams?"In the final volume of Ancestral Virgins, in the aftermath of war, the lives of Celia Ingham and May Hallam draw closer together as both bear the weight of a shocking family secret. Celia is struggling to accept the death of the only man she can ever love, and May is desperate to find her sister Lily, who has disappeared after becoming pregnant with her employer's child. As Celia and May each go in search of what they need to feel whole, they meet face to face in a railway station waiting room. By the time the train departs, one must reconcile herself to a troubling and unwelcome truth, while the other is on her way to a new life with an unexpected infusion of hope. Ancestral Virgins will appeal to fans of Sarah Waters and Kate Atkinson and to anyone enthralled by period dramas in film and television.