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 have no place for her. Her mother is pushing her to marry the rich industrialist George Ingham, but Celia is reluctant. Though she’s heard 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. 6