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Product Description
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, she takes on a new identity, determined to rehabilitate herself. To do so 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 Cunning takes readers to the world immortalized in Dangerous Liaisons. And, like Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White, the vividly rendered setting and characters give the thrill of a fresh discovery.
Amazon.com Review
If you like your women as cruel as they are beautiful, you may fall hard for Philippa Stockley's darkly witty novel, A Factory of Cunning, which follows an exiled French aristocrat as she pimps and swindles her way through London in the summer of 1784. Having been routed from Paris by a mob (for her involvement in a scandal), our resourceful heroine set herself up as a brothel keeper in Amsterdam, hiding behind her faithful but almost equally heartless servant Victoire. When the marquise's past misdeeds pursue her in the form of an assassin, she and Victoire flee for the English capital, where she assumes the name "Mrs. Fox" for reasons too ribald to reveal here. In journal entries and letters--especially to her Dutch admirer and protector Hubert van Essel, who enlists her in a long-simmering revenge against a former friend--"Mrs. Fox" describes the havoc she wreaks before stepping daintily out of danger, lifting her skirts to show her pretty ankles. In the spirit of Les Liaisons Dangeureuses, though composed in a higher key, A Factory of Cunning is the very definition of a guilty pleasure. --Regina Marler
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