Showing results by author "Dolly Price" in All Categories

A helpless baby is forsaken in a churchyard. This is how life begins for orphan Emma. Unwanted, cast aside, and thrown on the mercy of strangers, she grows up wondering why. And what are the mysterious gifts each year, placed where her cradle was once abandoned? Now blossomed to youthful beauty but shunned by society, the man she loves is forbidden to marry or court her.

Blackwell Union Workhouse hid a secret for eight long years. Two daughters born behind the dark walls thrust into the arms of the wrong mothers - one mother the Master’s wife, the other a slave of poverty, Dora. Phoebe and Claretta, the workhouse babies, switched at birth and thrust into an uncertain future. As the years unfurl, destiny sends the young ladies in different directions, but their hearts are bound. One runs, the other seeks. One haunted by fears, the other reaching for a faith and a future. Both longing for love.

Wrongfully torn from her daughter, a tearful mother leaves her beloved girl to fend for herself in an unforgiving Victorian world. But for her chilly relatives, Tess has no one else to turn to...and even they offer little hope.

Lady Napier is desperate to give her high-society husband an heir. Devastated by the birth of yet another girl, a secretive plot is hatched to replace the disappointing child with the newborn son of a local village woman.

Drugged and supposedly drowned by the mother who should have loved her, six-year-old Gwendoline is dredged from the Saltwick River. Poverty-stricken but rich in love, Mr. and Mrs. Paul love the tiny child as their own, until hard times and tragedy drive them to the workhouse. From this slavery, Gwendoline flees her present horror, only to run headlong into her unknown past, with consequences that tumble through the generations.

When Daisy Stanley's father tragically dies in a mining accident and her mother spirals into despair, the weight of responsibility falls upon the young six-year-old's shoulders.[

For the Burrows family, life is hard among the poorest of Liverpool. The port town by the Mersey is beautiful but bleak - for some a place of fortune, for others a daily struggle to survive. To help her family, the young, pretty, and penniless Lesley Burrows decides to get a job at her uncle’s flour mill. She does not realize that hidden behind the dark walls of the mill, family secrets wait to pounce.

At the age of nine, Rose Simmons’s childhood comes to an end. That’s the day when she loses her parents in the Crystal Palace Exhibition. Despite the helping hand of a young stranger, her parents are gone, and Rose is left alone.

After her parents die in a suspicious boating accident little Eliza is abandoned by her uncaring, unscrupulous guardians. If not for the love of the nuns in the convent she would surely have died. Little did she know that her coming of age would throw her back into peril when, after so many years, her scheming guardians reappear to kidnap and incarcerate her. What is the secret that Eliza holds that they are so keen to possess?

Abandoned by all who should protect her, the workhouse swallows the young life of Olivia Coomb. It also swallows her voice. Who could ever love a mute and broken girl like Olivia? Franklin Slater wants nothing more, but society slays his advances, and Olivia is forced to flee once again.

From an early age, Penelope Fowler dreams of escaping the grip of poverty. She helps her servant mother in the Eglinton House but prays one day she will be free to decide her own destiny.... Young Master Martin Eglinton accompanies his father to Peru and is horrified to discover that his family runs a cruel empire. Seeing the brutality of the fortune he is heir to, Master Martin’s return is wracked with guilt and sickness.

Deserted by a selfish man, and driven to the workhouse, young Annabel and her midwife mother face a harsh and hopeless future. A critical situation for the workhouse governor then opens a door of deliverance for them both, but it seems that revenge and bitterness hound their every step.

Forced first into a harsh life of servitude under the philandering lord Hazelhurst and later to the clutches of the lawyer, Mr. Quigley, Demelza knows she must escape before her virtue is compromised. Only her growing love for Nathaniel, the young master of Hazelhurst Grange, gives her strength to carry on, but when clues point to Mr. Quigley’s involvement in her father’s death, she is thrust out of the house.

It is 1874, and a lost little girl stands shivering outside Coll’s Bakery. No one on Lupin Lane recognises her, and the ever-present dangers of Whitechapel leave the fatherless child helpless. What can the elderly couple do but take this bedraggled and hungry orphan into their heart and home? Other than her name, Isabella’s past and how she ended up on Mr. and Mrs. Coll's doorstep remains a mystery. As Isabella flowers into a young woman, the secrets of the past float to the surface, as do family feuds and savage enemies of the innocent girl.

When savage family sickness, and the unscrupulous embezzling steward, Mr. Craven, steals the Boone's family fortune, he snatches Sandra Boone’s idyllic childhood from her innocent hands. The heartbroken child finds herself in a place she never thought possible – destitute and begging on the dirty, dangerous streets for her next meal. When opportunity opens the door for a life of servitude to a wealthy family, Sandra, crushed by the harshness of her unfair years, finally thinks fortune may be turning her way. Instead, a fire of controversy unfolds, forcing her to flee.

The docklands are no place for young Victorian ladies. Running here to escape the cruelty of their stepmother, sisters Clare and Anna fend for themselves in whatever way they can. Edgar’s only school has been the harsh London streets and the Dockland gangs. One thing he has learned above all else is never trust anyone. Never help anyone. Never open your heart... Until a simple act of kindness shakes Edgar’s world and with it the stony hardness from his heart.

Blossoming in a Victorian slum is an impossible dream. Hopes and dreams come here to die, not to be born. But Daphne is an unusually determined dreamer. Despite the disappearance of her parents and siblings, she holds to her goal. The workhouse can't stop her. The slums won't prevent her. Disaster and degradation only fuel her intentions.

Caroline is an orphan. Vulnerable and passed from family member to family member, until the fateful day she disappears in Surrey Gardens. All hope seems lost, until Arthur stumbles through the doors of the Lanyard Arms. Recently released from backbreaking punishment for a crime he did not commit, he is shocked and dismayed at what he discovers. Not only that, his heart is also captured by the mysterious Miss Davey.