Publisher's Synopsis
Nelly Ambrose is an East End seamstress with ideas above her station. Discontented with her reliable but conservative fiancé, George, she falls for the urbane charms of middle-class Arthur Grant, a married man bothered by few moral scruples. In her first novel, Harkness presents a vivid and troubling depiction of working-class life in late-Victorian London. Based on her own experience of the slums, she exposes the appalling conditions experienced by women in the casual labour force and their desperate struggle for economic security.
