So Great A Cost

​​​

My freedom is more attractive to me... I would never pay so great a cost.

Elizabeth Bennet was only fourteen years old when she lost her parents, her home, and her place in the world. Ten years later, she has made her own way. She is educated, independent, and quietly building a life on her own terms as a governess. A position at a grand estate in Derbyshire promises a generous salary, a sweet and shy little charge to win over, and the leisure to write the novel she has been carrying in her head for years. It also promises an absent master whom she has no intention of ever meeting.

​

When Fitzwilliam Darcy, widower of six years, comes home, he finds a daughter he scarcely knows and learns that his orderly household has been disarranged by a governess who reads too much, walks too far, and answers him too freely. When he can no longer pretend that what he feels for her is mere goodwill, he offers her the only thing a gentleman in his position can offer a woman in hers and discovers, to his astonishment, that Elizabeth Bennet does not consider his hand a rescue.

​

Her independence has been bought at so great a cost. She refuses to surrender it for a man who imagines his love a favour.

 

But Pemberley is not the only place where the past comes calling; a sister's tragedy, a homecoming long-deferred, and the patient work of a chastened heart may yet ask Elizabeth to count the cost of pride against the price of love.

​​