Book
The Outcast Girls
First published 2020
London, 1881. With work scarce at the World’s End Investigation Bureau, Lily Raynor accepts a schoolteacher’s request to investigate girls who have run away from Shardlowes, a boarding school in the Fens. Lily enters the school disguised as an assistant matron while Felix Wilbraham remains in London and begins looking into the powerful men who finance places for poorer pupils.
What appears to be a straightforward missing-person case exposes a system in which vulnerable girls depend on patrons who expect obedience and silence in return. The investigation moves between London and the Fens, using a mystery plot to examine Victorian schooling, class, institutional discipline and the dangers facing young women with little social power.
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