Run Mad

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I was not mad. I was inconvenient.

When Elizabeth Bennet rejects Mr Darcy’s proposal at Hunsford, she believes she has merely exercised a woman's last freedom: the right of refusal. But when a careless letter carries word of it back to Longbourn, her father’s characteristic indolence curdles into something monstrous. A wit too sharp, a will too strong, a daughter who will not marry where she is bid: to the right physician, these are not faults of character but symptoms of mental illness. Drugged and spirited north, Elizabeth wakes behind the locked doors of a private madhouse, the place where inconvenient women are sent to be cured of having minds of their own.

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Ten months later, Fitzwilliam Darcy comes for her. But the only way to free her is to make her his wife in truth, by papers forged in a debtor’s gaol and binding in the eyes of the law. Elizabeth escapes one cage only to discover she has become the property of the very man she once turned away.

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She will not be grateful. She will not be managed. She will not fall in love with her rescuer.

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Then the blackmailer's letters begin, threatening to parade her ruin before all the world. And Elizabeth must decide whether the man who took her freedom might be the one to help her seize it back, and whether the only way out of the shadows is to walk, at last, into the light.