The novel interweaves the stories of three young people who have just debuted into society – Helena, the daughter of a prominent doctor hoping to be engaged to her childhood sweetheart August, said childhood sweetheart and heir to a powerful shipping firm and Margaret, otherwise known as Victoria-Margaret, the heir to the British Throne, who’s gone undercover hoping to experience the “real” Empire before taking on her royal duties. Basically, it’s still Victorian society, but in a future with supercomputers and gene decoders. Johnston’s world, it’s far more multicultural than it was in real life – and corsets are still a required part of formal wear (except now they’re fashionable bio-tech accessories). Two hundred years later, the result is that the British Empire never fell – though in author E.K. In the world of That Inevitable Victorian Thing, Queen Victoria was an empowered forward-thinker who made her daughter heir instead of her son and forged marriage alliances with important families across all of England’s colonized territories rather than just between Europe’s royal families.
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