Pleasing Mr Pepys

by Deborah Swift Book 1 in the Women of Pepys’ Diary series.

First published 2017

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4.2(840)

London, 1667. Deb Willet escapes a restrictive aunt by becoming companion to Elisabeth Pepys, wife of the naval administrator and diarist Samuel Pepys. The position promises independence and access to a wider world, but Deb soon discovers that the Pepys household is shaped by Samuel’s ambitions, appetites and secrets as much as by Elisabeth’s expectations.

Against the political and naval tensions of Restoration London, Deb is forced to judge how far patronage can protect her and how easily dependence can become vulnerability. Drawing on people recorded in Pepys’s diary, the novel shifts the centre of the story away from the diarist and towards the women whose lives he observed but did not control on the page.