A novel based on an unfinished manuscript by Charlotte Brontë.

A story of a child of an apparently wealthy family, who is enrolled with great ceremony at a local ladies' school. But the girl's wealth and standing are illusory, as the school discovers when term bills go unpaid and the girl's father proves to be nonexistent. The question of the girl's origins proves to be a stone thrown into a much larger Victorian pond. A local gentleman, Mr. Ellin, takes up the investigation, which leads him from the most posh clubs in London to the cesspools of the city's lowest quarters; the shocking secrets which come out of it will change his life, and everyone else's, forever