The Price of Hannah Blake: Victorian England's Secret Sex Scandal
The Price of Hannah Blake: Victorian England's Secret Sex Scandal
by Walter Donway
THE PRICE OF HANNAH BLAKE is in the tantalizing tradition of the Victorian underground erotic novel, but with the pace and suspense of a contemporary thriller, as Hannah Blake fights for survival in Victorian England’s bizarre “Duke’s Troupe” of dancers and actors.
You fall in love with Hannah’s beauty, her courage in the face of unimaginable abuse, and her determination to assert her own awakening passion—and love—in the duke’s prison of luxury and license.
You are swept along as the unspoiled farm girl from Devon is torn from her family, stripped and appraised by her ruthless instructors, forcibly “initiated” into the cruel erotic games of the young men and women of the troupe—and fights to survive and preserve her deepest values. It is romantic suspense that seizes you and draws you forward ever faster as Hannah falls in love with the man who will risk everything to save her from enslavement to the duke and his consorts--a fate no one ever has escaped.
Here is a bitter and beautiful recreation of the Age of Victoria, a period that has become synonymous with modesty and sexual repression, but which concealed a frenzy of secret lust, twisted sexuality, and cruelty.
Striding through these pages, as the peril of young Hannah Blake and her daring lover mounts, are historic figures such as the great reformer Prime Minister William Gladstone, his First Lord of the Admiralty, Sherlock Holmes and the malevolent Professor Moriarty--and the prostitutes, sailors, lords and ladies, courtiers, and often desperately poor English country folk who gave the age its color and character.
Bringing them all together is the unbreakable spirit of Hannah, a prisoner of corruption and lust who awakens to a yearning passion—and love—few in the repressed and rigid age of Victoria could imagine.
THE PRICE OF HANNAH BLAKE is about nothing less than the battle for salvation of womanhood and its dearest desires.