A Factory of Cunning [Paperback]

Set in late eighteenth-century England, Philippa Stockley’s American debut gives us a wickedly delightful but deadly serious battle of the wills and the sexes. It begins with the arrival in London of the mysterious Mrs. Fox—on the run from a scandalous French past—who takes a new identity, determined to reinvent herself. She must pit her formidable skills for revenge against Earl Much, a British aristocrat with no less notorious a past and easily her match in sinfulness and intrigue. Between these two swirls a story featuring venal lords, wronged maidens, and reprobate clergymen, transporting readers from bawdy houses to country estates—places where the pleasures of the flesh are both high comedy and serious business. 
 
A Factory of Cunningtakes readers to the world immortal­ized inDangerous Liaisons.And, like Michel Faber’sThe Crimson Petal and the White,the vividly rendered setting and characters give the thrill of a fresh discovery.

Philippa Stockley's heroine is a gloriously scheming and amoral French aristocrat, who goes by her nom de plume of Mrs Fox. Arriving in London with only a handful of gold and her loyal maidservant she sets about establishing herself with the high society. Mrs Fox is on the run from her past - and is being sought by a nameless would-be avenger - and her wish is to create a new, safe identity for herself as well as make lots of money, by whatever means possible.

Here are evil Earls, virginal lasses, bawdy clerics and a plot full complex twists and turns all told in an extraordinarily accurate 18th Century voice. The World of DANGEROUS LIAISONS is brilliantly bought to life in a swaggering, bawdy and very funny novel.

'I let my hand fall into my lap so woefully that Daneacre snatched it up again, creeping a little closer, his moleskin breeches denting my skirts. Now that he felt me to be unprotected I was fair game, as easy a prospectl“+