Daring and Decorum

Elizabeth Collington, the twenty-year-old daughter of a country vicar, longs for more than the circumscribed life of her 18th-century Devonshire village. When a highwayman steals a kiss along with her mother's necklace - provoking feelings of which her father would never approve - she suddenly has a secret no one must know. But the highwayman also has a secret: "he" is actually a woman.

Will the story of the highwayman's past - complete with a tyrannical husband, a gloomy castle, and a daring escape into London's underworld - persuade Elizabeth to abandon propriety in favor of passion? In the end, can the lovers make an independent life in a world where women are little more than property, evading both the redcoats and the jealous young lord who would tear them apart?

Daring and Decorum is comedy of manners wrapped around a gothic tale; a mashup of Jane Austen, Alfred Noyes' poem The Highwayman, Robin Hood, and Moll Cutpurse; and a passionate case for the freedom to love whom one chooses, Daring and Decorum: A Highwayman Novel should appeal to fans of Ellen Kushner's Riverside series, Emma Donoghue's Life Mask, and Michelle Martin's Pembroke Park (billed as the first lesbian Regency).