Excerpt from THE GOOD DAUGHTERS by Brigitte Dale:
CHAPTER ONE
CHARLOTTE
Charlotte Evans has exactly one day left at home, and she is deter- mined to spend it wisely. For years, nothing mattered more to
her than getting out—out of her brooding stepfather’s house, away from her mother’s criticism and her sisters’ squabbling. And out, most importantly, into the world, where ideas matter and intelligence is valued. When the day finally arrives to pack her bags, her fingers quiver with nervous energy each time she places a folded blouse in the valise. Months of studying by candlelight after her chores, books stacked high around her like a fortress, followed by weeks of begging, arguing, and pleading with her parents, earned her a spot at Girton College. She will not squander this chance at freedom.
Still, it’s been a long summer. A reckless summer.
“Charlotte,” says Sarah, lips pursed. “Come upstairs for a moment.” Charlotte’s stomach drops with a low, deep sense of dread, as she follows her mother up the creaky wooden staircase and into the master bedroom. The faded blue curtains are still drawn, even though it is almost midday, and they stand in near darkness. Even so, Charlotte can see the apprehension etched upon her mother’s face. Does she know?
She wills her face to stay impassive, her voice to remain steady. She reminds herself to breathe.
“What is it, Mother?”
Sarah wrings her hands and exhales. “Just . . . be careful. Be good and be careful.”
“Mother—”
“I mean it, Charlotte. Your virtue, once lost, is—”
Charlotte sighs, cutting off her mother’s last words: gone forever.
“I know, Mother.” The usual sarcasm returns to her voice as her body floods with a warm rush of relief—she has not been caught.
From the time Charlotte was five years old and permitted to cross the street on her own, her mother has repeated the importance of virtue. Sometimes she used other words, like purity or honor, but the message was always the same, delivered with frantic fervor. Charlotte has long considered the warning melodramatic, and she and her sisters used to joke about it behind their mother’s back.
“Careful,” they’d say when Sylvia began to knead dough, or as Anna left for school. “Your virtue, once lost, is gone forever.” It became a run- ning joke, a game: Who could attribute warnings about promiscuity to the most mundane or absurd activities?
Still, Sarah is tense as they stand together in the dark bedroom. “Please, Charlotte,” she says, her voice a hair higher than usual, a violin string tuned too tight.
“Yes, Mother.” Charlotte bends to kiss her cheek. Sarah remains stiff.
The irony, of course, is that Charlotte has not been virtuous at all this summer. When Sylvia walked into the root cellar last week, Charlotte had needed to cover Jack’s face with her palm to stifle his laughter. She had been almost certain that her younger sister heard them down there. But after an excruciating moment, holding her breath in the dark and jabbing Jack in the ribs as he fumbled with her skirts, Sylvia had turned on her heel and climbed back upstairs. Charlotte avoided her sister’s gaze for days afterward, a million insufficient explanations at the tip of her tongue should Sylvia decide to confront her.
She’d been so worried that Sylvia would tell their mother, that somehow Sarah already knew and would pounce at the excuse to prevent Charlotte from leaving. This last week home, she lived in a constant state of anxiety. Charlotte swore off Jack and promised herself perfect pro- priety until, at last, she boarded the train bound for Cambridge. Jack was no one; it didn’t matter. They were children, neighbors, friends running around their tiny village unsupervised and sneaking private moments together. Over the years, Charlotte had struggled to find the words for the raw desire she disguised, the feelings she could not quite express. Not that she dared to speak them aloud. Though she and her sisters used to poke fun at their mother’s dire prognostications, sometime in the last few years they had stopped. Charlotte cannot quite remember when or why they ceased joking together, but she knows she can never, ever tell them about Jack. Sylvia and Anna wouldn’t understand.
There is a distance between herself and her sisters, and not just caused by age, although the four years between Charlotte and Sylvia feel more like a chasm lately. It is that Sylvia and Anna breathe propriety. They have no interest in running through town on mad escapades alongside Charlotte, following whatever impulsive whim left her skirts muddy and her heart pounding. They are inexplicably content to stay home and help Sarah with the chores. Charlotte, on the other hand, had to beg for George and Sarah to consider her plea to attend Girton College. But most of all, Sylvia and Anna are younger, so they love George, their stepfather, who feels more like a father than anyone they’ve ever known. Charlotte, however, remembers her real papa, a man gentler and lovelier than George Penfield could ever be.
Naturally, Charlotte never told Sylvia and Anna about what she did that summer, about what she allowed Jack to do in those final weeks before she escaped that stifling life forever. There had been years of touches, stolen kisses, chaste but curious. Then, at last, in the waning days of August, when each blade of grass was verdant and singing with life, she had said yes and yes and yes.
Charlotte had thought it might hurt. Lie back and think of England, the girls at school had whispered. But it hadn’t hurt. Nor had it been particularly pleasurable. The damp chill of the root cellar hadn’t much contributed to a sense of romance. But unlike the tacit warnings she had internalized over the years, Charlotte did not feel ruined or violated or dominated. She felt, in fact, oddly powerful. She had consumed him, taken his most vulnerable piece inside of her. If that wasn’t power, what was? She didn’t love him, of course. But she wanted him. And that felt like enough.
Still, whether or not her summer with Jack meant something or everything or nothing at all, if she had been caught, there would be no Girton College. There would be no future. She would have been married off, if she was lucky. Otherwise, she’d have been ruined. Thank God for Sylvia’s naiveté. On her last night at home, Charlotte keeps her hands busy, leaping at every chore placed before her. She knows how close she came to missing her chance.
With a puff of black smoke and a short, sharp whistle, the train jostles into motion. George sits across from her, his nose, as usual, in his newspaper. It was kind of him to accompany her, she supposes, though she’d have preferred her mother. But Sarah doesn’t travel alone. Or at all. Charlotte can’t remember the last time her mother left Fulney. Through the plate-glass windows, she watches brown fields and tiny, pinprick villages blur in the setting sun. The countryside rolls past as Charlotte travels farther from home than she has ever been in her life.
Like indigo dye in a vat of cotton, the horizon grows darker and more beautiful with each shift in light as day descends to darkness.
The train jolts into the Cambridge Railway Station, and George folds the paper, then straightens his cravat. Charlotte’s cheek is numb from the cold window. She still wears her stiff traveling cloak, the one her mother sewed herself on candlelit evenings this summer, sacrificing her own eyesight to save the few extra shillings it would have cost to buy the cloak new in the village. Girton was, Sarah reminded Charlotte at every opportunity, costing George a fortune. Beneath the cloak, Charlotte wears a starched blouse, buttoned up to her chin, and under it, a tightly laced corset. The whalebone cuts into her ribs from sitting too long in one position. Her heart thrums against it as the yellow lights of Cambridge come into view. Wordlessly, George stands and gestures for a porter to retrieve their bags.
Charlotte’s rooms in Girton College feel like pure luxury. Unlike her sisters, Charlotte still remembers the days before they moved in with their stepfather, before they had a cook and a housemaid to light the fires every morning. Her younger sisters have forgotten what it was to wake up cold. George is not rich, no—he hunches over the expenses each month, and when Sarah thinks he won’t notice, she pores over the bills, too, performing her own calculations to determine how best to scrounge and save. They are comfortable enough, but always, it seems, teetering on the edge. Back home, all three sisters shared a bedroom.
Now, Charlotte discovers that she has a bedroom and an adjoining sitting room all to herself, with a narrow bed frame, a small wooden writing desk with an inkstand, a chest of drawers, and even a simple mantel surrounding her very own hearth—all of it is hers and hers alone. A thick though faded carpet covers most of the floor, and the windows, which look out on to manicured gardens, are curtained in cream-colored lace.
She hasn’t brought anything with which to decorate the room, though she notices girls and their parents dragging in extra furniture and paintings and spare blankets. Out in the hall, mothers instruct the porters on how to hang drapes and where to store furs. George stands in the doorway fiddling with his pocket watch.
“I think I’m settled,” Charlotte says. She’ll unpack her simple valise on her own. George slips an envelope of folded bills into her hand before he leaves. Perhaps she has judged him too harshly. He had helped her fill out her application to Girton back when her mother was against it. Sarah thought that a university education meant a long, expensive road to spinsterhood.
“You’ll ruin yourself for marriage,” Sarah had fretted. “Why do you need to learn more than you already know?”
“Because,” Charlotte had said, “I don’t know what I don’t know.
And I’ll never be satisfied unless I find out.”
Charlotte and George had teamed up for the first time in her life in order to convince Sarah that her fears of the masculinizing effects of university were unwarranted, and that the pursuit of an education was not incompatible with Charlotte’s future life as a wife and mother. Though he probably just wanted his overambitious eldest stepdaughter out of the house, Charlotte had been grateful for George’s support. His only true flaw, she knows, is that George is not her real father. Papa would have been proud; she remembers how his eyes crinkled when he laughed—the same wide brown eyes she had inherited. Charlotte has not seen her mother’s real smile since Papa died. She wishes Sarah could have come to drop her off at Girton, could have exhibited some pride, or at least some support, instead of acting the ever-gracious, frugal housewife, demurring to George’s every whim, making herself small within their home.
All that is behind Charlotte now, thank goodness. She watches George putter down the stone pathway out her window before he disappears onto the street. And then she is alone. How exhilarating it feels to be entirely, wonderfully solitary! Each patter of the floorboards comes from her very own feet. The air smells like paper and ink, and the whole place hums with possibility. She explores the building, noting the stairs that creak and the ones that don’t, the intricate molding where the corridors meet the ceiling. Ghostly faces of long- dead benefactors grimace at her from their gilded frames.
The stern housemother, Mrs. Pennington, has the face of a trout and lives at the end of the hall. “Girton College,” she intones on their first night, all the girls gathered in the library for prayers, “is one of the few institutions intended solely for women that has ever been built in England. It is, in fact, among the few such institutions in the entire world, with the exception of convents, created to educate women. You must endeavor to embody all the superior qualities of womanhood and good breeding, so that you may go out into the world and improve it through manners, femininity, and grace.”
Charlotte scans the room, noting the huddle of first-year girls who hang on Mrs. Pennington’s words. The second-year cohort is rather smaller, but the third-years, she realizes, are reduced to only a handful. She doesn’t mean to be cruel, but all she can think, as she looks at the oldest students, is how awkward most of them seem—all but a few dress in outdated clothes and hover near the corner in their small flock. Charlotte quickly learns that Mrs. Pennington is even more obsessive about virtue and chastity than her mother. Known for regimental surveillance of her charges, Mrs. Pennington makes it her mission to put a stop to any behavior that might associate her girls with unfeminine bluestockings. Education, she insists, won’t take Girton girls off the marriage market.
As Charlotte comes downstairs for seven o’clock breakfast on her first morning, Mrs. Pennington pokes out her metal-tipped cane, nearly causing Charlotte to trip.
“Young lady, how dare you present yourself in this state of undress?”
Charlotte flushes red—has she forgotten her knickers? But after a quick assessment, she’s certain she is fully clothed.
“Your hair,” Mrs. Pennington continues, pointing a knobby finger at the single braid that winds down Charlotte’s back. “Girton girls must wear buns at all times.”
“I’m just going down to breakfast,” Charlotte protests. “I’ll pin it up later.”
“You’ll do it now,” Mrs. Pennington admonishes. “And do not let me see you in such a state of dishabille again.”
Charlotte hurries back upstairs, her neck hot. It takes far longer than she would like to do her hair properly. Back home, she rarely had reason to wear it up, and for the odd formal occasion, she and her sisters helped each other. Now Charlotte huffs into the tiny looking glass, pins between her lips like a porcupine. She’s done it all out of order—already dressed, she can hardly lift her arms high enough to manage her hair. When at last she’s succeeded in fashioning some semblance of a chignon, she rushes back downstairs. She steels herself to enter the dining room full of strangers, hoping there will still be a seat free at a friendly table. The door creaks as she pushes it open, and the room falls silent, eyes greeting her with cold stares. Charlotte is acutely aware of the loose strands in the back that she couldn’t reach, of the beads of sweat dripping between her breasts and dampening her chemise. She cannot find a seat, and her footsteps are too loud. The girls turn back to their plates, heads bowed as they laugh and whisper together.
Mrs. Pennington sits at the head of the table, unperturbed.
Over the next several days, Charlotte observes her classmates but speaks to almost no one. Or, rather, almost no one speaks to her. It appears that most of the girls are from London, and they all know each other already. They’ve been to the same finishing schools, attended the same parties, and seem to have little interest in meeting anyone else. Charlotte tries to participate when the conversation presents even the slightest opening. “Pretty dress,” she is quick to compliment, or “Have you read Wollstonecraft, too?” The responses are usually concise—thank-yous, and yeses or nos—before backs turn and Char- lotte is, once again, on the outside.
At teatime she overhears fellow first-years, all dressed impeccably, whispering about the men at King’s College.
“Will you stay next year?” Flora St. Clare, an earl’s daughter, asks the beautiful, raven-haired Georgina Fernsby-Bryce.
“I haven’t decided,” says Georgina, batting her black lashes conspiratorially. “The engagement, though unofficial,” she mock whispers, “is set for spring. I suppose it depends if I’ve had time to prepare my trousseau.”
Flora nods emphatically. “Well, if you leave before our second year is finished, so will I,” she says. “My father has a third cousin I’m meant to meet soon, but even if that doesn’t work out, I’d rather be back in town than here alone.”
“Pardon my interruption,” says Charlotte. “But what do you mean, here alone?”
The girls turn to her but no one responds. It’s as though she asked her question in a foreign tongue. At last, Georgina explains, in a voice one would usually reserve to communicate with a child or someone hard of hearing, that no one stays for their third year at Girton College. “Unless,” she adds, as an apologetic afterthought, “she has no marriage prospects.” The diminished cohort of third-years suddenly makes sense.
Soon Flora and Georgina swish away in their silk skirts, leaving Charlotte in the wake of their whispers about the London season, wondering just what sort of world she’s landed in.
No matter, she tells herself. Be patient. Charlotte explores the charming Cambridge streets on her own, counting the spires of medieval towers that pierce the gray autumn skies. And when the clouds open up and the air is dense with cold rain, she finds squashy chairs in the library and reads undisturbed for hours at a time. She feasts nightly in the dining hall, enjoying pudding at every meal and rich roasted chicken that she is never required to pluck or prepare herself. She hopes—no, she knows—it is only a matter of time before she finds friends. She must hold on.
At night, she hears girls clamoring down the halls, doors opening and closing as they visit each other. She leaves her door propped open, but though laughter trills through the corridors, no one knocks. Charlotte breathes deeply, reminding herself to relish each moment. She’s here, isn’t she? In her very own room at England’s premiere college for women.
How dare she feel lonely when her dreams have come true?
Copyright © 2025 Brigitte Dale
Narrator: Harrie Dobby
A Novel
A moving and vivid story of three suffragettes in London and the battle for equality that tests the strength of their will and the bonds of their friendship.
In 1912, three young women from wildly different backgrounds are bound together by their desire to have a say in their future.
Charlotte, disappointed to discover that college isn’t the key to the freedom she longed for, shocks her family when she moves to London and joins a group of suffragettes willing to upend social norms for the vote. Aristocratic Beatrice, with a law degree she legally can’t put into practice and a fiancé she’s not particularly excited to marry, escapes to London to spend her last months of unmarried life with the suffragettes, and falls deeply—and dangerously—into forbidden love. Emily, the daughter of the warden of the infamous Holloway Jail, grieves her mother and saves her wages for a better life outside the prison’s walls. Her best chance at escaping the drudgery of her life is to stay out of trouble, but when the suffragettes land in her father’s cells, she must consider risking not only her family’s livelihood, but her own future.
With the dangerous stakes of the suffrage campaign becoming a fight for the women’s bodies and lives, they enter a treacherous world where the laws and justice system are stacked against them. They face violent protests, hunger strikes, and brutal forced feedings, and the women must decide how much they are willing to risk for their freedom and for each other.
Women's Fiction Friendship | Women's Fiction Historical | Coming of Age [ Pegasus Books, On Sale: November 4, 2025, Hardcover / e-Book / audiobook, ISBN: 9781639369874 / eISBN: 9781639369881 ]
Brigitte Dale is an author, editor, and historian. She graduated from Brown University and earned her master's degree in women's history at Yale University. A book editor by day and an author by night (or early morning), Brigitte lives in Connecticut. The Good Daughters is her first novel.
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