Daring and Decorum: A Highwayman Novel

Elizabeth Collington, the twenty-year-old daughter of a country vicar, longs for more than the circumscribed life of her 18th-century Devonshire village. When a highwayman steals a kiss along with her mother's necklace - provoking feelings of which her father would never approve - she suddenly has a secret no one must know. But the highwayman also has a secret: "he" is actually a woman. Will the story of the highwayman's past - complete with a tyrannical husband, a gloomy castle, and a daring escape into London's underworld - persuade Elizabeth to abandon propriety in favor of passion? In the end, can the lovers make an independent life in a world where women are little more than property, evading both the redcoats and the jealous young lord who would tear them apart?Daring and Decorum is comedy of manners wrapped around a gothic tale; a mashup of Jane Austen, Alfred Noyes' poem The Highwayman, Robin Hood, and Moll Cutpurse; and a passionate case for the freedom to love whom one chooses, Daring and Decorum: A Highwayman Novel should appeal to fans of Ellen Kushner's Riverside series, Emma Donoghue's Life Mask, and Michelle Martin's Pembroke Park (billed as the first lesbian Regency).