Suffering an intense year of public and police scrutiny after being wrongly implicated in his fiance's murder, Boston lawyer Eli Landon takes sanctuary in a centuries-old family home and falls in love with resident housekeeper Abra Walsh, with whom he is entangled in an old, life-threatening mystery.

When a servant girl is found dead, a supposed suicide, Victorian gentleman and amateur sleuth Charles Lenox is called in by his old friend, Lady Jane, to investigate and begins to suspect that the girl has fallen victim to a rare and deadly poison.

A novel whose principal characters are the servants in Jane Austen's Pride and prejudice. "If Elizabeth Bennet had the washing of her own petticoats, Sarah often thought, she’d most likely be a sight more careful with them. In this irresistibly imagined belowstairs answer to Pride and Prejudice, the servants take center stage. Sarah, the orphaned housemaid, spends her days scrubbing the laundry, polishing the floors, and emptying the chamber...

A young woman struggling to support her family in depression era Key West takes a job with the family of writer Ernest Hemingway, learning new things about life.

Grace Bradley went to work at Riverton House as a servant when she was just a girl, before the First World War. For years her life was inextricably tied up with the Hartford family, most particularly the two daughters, Hannah and Emmeline. In the summer of 1924, at a glittering society party held at the house, a young poet shot himself. The only witnesses were Hannah and Emmeline and only they--and Grace--know the truth. In 1999, when Grace is ninety-eight...

A ne'er-do-well exploits his gentle daughter's beauty for social advancement in this masterpiece of tragic fiction. Hardy's 1891 novel defied convention to focus on the rural lower class for a frank treatment of sexuality and religion. Then and now, his sympathetic portrait of a victim of Victorian hypocrisy offers compelling reading.

Araceli is the last of three live-in maids in the Torres-Thompson house, where recession has taken its toll, both on two previous maids no longer employed, and the Torres-Thompson marriage. Financial pressure causes discord between the parents, resulting in fights the children shouldn't hear. Then one morning after one of those fights, Araceli wakes up to a house empty--except for the children.

In the early 1900s, Sylvie Pelletier leaves her family's Colorado mountain cabin to start work at a wealthy mine-owner's manor house and is fascinated by he luxury around her until she discovers the family's philosophy is at odds with the unfair labor practices that built their fortune.

Roger is a successful movie producer. Ah Tao has worked for Roger's family as a nanny and maid over the course of four generations. When Roger comes home to find Ah Tao's suffered a severe stroke and she is unable to care for herself, he agrees to help her relocate to a nursing home. He wants to help, but fears he'll fail her. She needs his kindness, but doesn't want to be a burden. As their roles reverse, he becomes her caregiver, and comes to understand...