Cecilia or Too Tall To Love: A Regency Romance

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What can orphaned Cecilia Beaumaris, a too tall, too outspoken gentlewoman with no pretensions to beauty and no fortune, do when the school she has been living in for nearly fifteen years, first as a pupil, then as a teacher, is closed down and she has to leave? She decides to open her own school, of course. But she can’t touch her small inheritance until she is twenty-five, so she has to live temporarily with her aunt and uncle. But they don’t want her. To get her married off, they invent a fortune she doesn’t have and she is besieged by fortune hunters. Enter Lord Thomas Allenby, a handsome, fashionable fribble, who has his own reasons for wanting to escape the marriage mart. He persuades her to announce a faux betrothal, but it doesn’t work out quite how Cecilia expects.
Against the background of early nineteenth century London, with its fashionable Mayfair mansions, East End slums and the development of public education, this Regency Romance is the story of how one woman seeks to improve the lives of impoverished girls by opening a school for them. The effect on her own life is beyond her wildest imaginings.