It was to be a respectable marriage to a man engaged in a respectable business. Certainly 34-year-old Frances Scott, forced into genteel poverty despite an aristocratic heritage, has little choice but to wed the lower class Bristol shipping merchant.

Trading her social connections for his protection in the brutally male-dominated world of eighteenth-century England, Frances discovers that her husband's "respectable" trade-- dealing in African slaves-- will propel her into a passionate fight for romance, life and the freedom of the slave she comes to love deeply.

A saga of desire and shame, of dramatic confrontations between convention and truth, "A Respectable Trade" is a disturbing and yet truly satisfying novel from "the first lady of intelligent historical fiction."