A Lady of Passion: Isobel's After Dark Regency Romance
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A Lady of Passion is my "After Dark" version of the The Secret Bluestocking. The stories are nearly identical, but A Lady of Passion is rewritten slightly to allow Isobel and Francis' relationship to have a strong physical component.
What would you do if you were intelligent, independent, wealthy and had an interest in archaeology? If you're the Honorable Miss Isobel Paley, you do as you please, but you would keep it as your most guarded secret.
Isobel's story is set in a time of social change, after Mary Wollstonecraft published her famous "A Vindication on the Rights of Woman," positing (correctly, of course!) that women were not inferior to men. Even so, Society hadn't yet changed to the degree that a free-thinking woman of means could be open about her "unseemly" interests.
Isobel happily pursues her intellectual (and other) passions without a care for marriage. She's perfectly capable of tending to her own life as a trendsetter in fashion during the Season and an archaeologist in Scotland during the summer. Marriage, she believes, is only the surrender of her legal identity, independence and fortune to the whims of a man. Further, celibacy, to Isobel, is a waste of youth.
Then an accident outside her country estate brings Major Lord Francis Wheaton into her life and her home. Lord Francis, recently back from the Peninsular Wars, must convalesce at Isobel's manor, being too injured to travel.
What follows is the tale of two strong-willed individuals, both harboring secrets of their own, and their undeniable attraction to one another. Will Isobel succeed in keeping her secret? Will Lord Francis find what he needs? And just who is the mysterious Marcus Paley?