Leading a quiet life in County Clare, Justine O'Leary was counting down the weeks to her safe and predictable wedding to Paul Smithers, a respectable local reverend. Her world is thrown into chaos when Father Michael O'Neil visits her family home to settle a feud with a neighbouring family. Although he has taken a vow of celibacy, something about the dashing cleric makes her question her future. Justine senses the priest feels the same way but knows she must never give in to her secret love. Making a heart-wrenching decision, her life is torn apart by threats, pain and isolation. Will marital respectability bring misery to the rest of Justine's life - 'until death do they part'? Or, one day, might the two forbidden lovebirds have a chance of happiness?

Jane is a New Yorker to the core, city-based and career-driven. But when her teenage daughter Natalie falls in with the wrong crowd at her Manhattan school, Jane's British husband Andrew decides to relocate from new York to a small village on Britain's Cumbrian coast, buying a vast and crumbling former vicarage. Jane hates everything about her new life: the silence, the solitude, the utter isolation. Natalie is no better, and their son Ben struggles in his new school. Even worse, Jane's difficulties create new tensions between her and Andrew. When Jane finds a scrap of an old shopping list, she becomes fascinated with Alice James, who lived in the vicarage decades before. The Vicar's Wife takes readers on an emotional journey as two very different women learn the desires of their hearts - and confront their deepest fears.

The diary of a clerical wife during the Second World War provides fascinating insights into life at the time. War had an impact on even genteel civilians in unraided cities like Oxford (though safety was never assured), among them Madge Martin (born 1899), wife of the vicar of St Michael at the North Gate, Oxford. Her pre-war life, full of travel, theatre visits, walks, books and films, was jolted into very different realities: she found herself undertaking more housework (by 1943 she had lost both her maids), volunteering with the Red Cross, and housing her two sisters' families, who self-evacuated at different times to Madge's home to escape London's air raids. Her private diary, engagingly and accessibly written, discloses much about her thoughts and feelings and social relations; some tribulations (she endured serious and frequent headaches); and her ambivalences concerning her role as a parson's wife. It shows both the persistence of comfortable, established lifestyles and necessary adaptations to theconstraints of existing in wartime. It is presented here with notes and introduction. PATRICIA and ROBERT MALCOLMSON are social historians with a special interest in Mass Observation, women in World War Two, and Englishdiaries written between the 1930s and the 1950s.

Imagine living with an eccentric genius in a remote Cornish village in the days of horse-drawn transport. Imagine that you are 20 years older than your husband, a handsome clergyman with a strange fondness for opiates. Imagine that you are faced with middle age and approaching poverty, and you have to sell your birthright to support the life and work of the poetic yet dedicated priest you have married.

The final instalment in Viveka Portman's sexy, sinful Regency Diaries sees an unhappy wife desperately seeking love ... and her taciturn husband who doesn't know how to reach her. My husband, though I do not doubt his goodness, does not love nor want me. He married me for pure convenience. He needed a bride and I was the one offered to him. Thus I find my pleasures where I may… Mrs Maria Reeves has been married for six years. Six long, lonely years. She craves love and affection, but married to a handsome but pious vicar she receives little in the way of earthly pleasures. The Reverend Vicar Frederick Reeves is a man of principle and morals, and is more likely to provide his wife with suggested Bible readings than carnal knowledge. If her husband will not please her, then she will find a man who will. But infidelity doesn't come naturally to the vicar's wife. Though Maria finds herself getting the sexual pleasure she desires, she also finds herself emotionally frayed and unhappy. To make matters worse, in the small village of Stanton there are always people watching, and Maria discovers that some secrets are impossible to keep. What will her upright husband do when he discovers that Maria has broken not only one of the commandments, but her vows to him?