Showing Duchess by Josephine Edgar

This is the story of Viola Corbett, an illegitimate Yorkshire girl who came south to seek her fortune as a shop girl and became 'Duchess', the toast and the scandal of Victorian London. Her beauty and her grace took her from the heights of passion to the depths of shame, from a recklessly passionate love to a sadistically violent marriage and, finally, trial for murder, before she won her way from rags to riches.