The Weight of Principle: a Voice Refused Own Voice Book

Volume I: The Weight of PrincipleIn a damp, rotting manor house, Miss Clara Kynaston—fiercely intelligent, radically principled, and impoverished—watches her family’s future disintegrate. The ticking clock of the entail on her father’s estate means that upon his death, she and her four sisters will be cast out, their respectable name a worthless defense against the horrors of the debtor’s prison. Their only hope is the humiliating spectacle of the marriage mart.Their new neighbor, the impossibly wealthy and arrogant Lord Deverell, represents everything Clara despises. His vast, opulent fortune is built on the slave-labor plantations she secretly writes scathing abolitionist essays against. Their worlds collide at a lavish ball, igniting a tense battle of wits —an ideological clash between her rigid, moral absolutism and his cold, assessing power.But as Clara’s family teeters on the brink of ruin, Deverell makes a stunning, pragmatic proposal. Born of pride and political calculation, his offer of marriage would save her family. For Clara, it is a horrifying choice: stay true to her conscience and damn her family, or accept a man whose very existence is a moral stain. Her furious refusal, born of both intellectual pride and genuine principle, is an act of defiance that will set the stage for a far more dangerous conflict.For readers who:Prefer the cold political maneuvering of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall to the romance of Jane Austen.Crave the sharp, cynical dialogue and high-stakes social combat of A Dangerous Liaisons for the Regency era.Appreciate heroines with a “brittle, intellectual pride” and antagonists who are “not a simple villain” but a complex “vector of power”.Want their historical fiction to serve as a “clinical dissection of power, class, and compromise”, where the stakes are not just a good marriage, but survival itself.