The Jilt
The Graces Series, Book One
By M. Battle Jackson
Independently Published
Published: February 7, 2025
ISBN: 9798988641155
Genre: Regency Historical Romance
When Grace Trelawny discovers her betrothed in the arms of another woman, she does the unthinkable: she calls off the wedding.
Society calls her a jilt. Newspapers hint at scandal. Her father calls it her final season.
Grace calls it the beginning.
Forced from London and into the countryside with nothing but her mother, a crumbling estate, and a refusal to be defined by what was done to her, Grace transforms their home into Miss Grace’s Seminary for Young Women. She has no money, no experience, and no guarantee of success. What she has is an unshakeable conviction that her life belongs to her.
Then Captain Marcus Chamberlain arrives to enroll his niece, Violet. A career soldier with no plans to marry, Marcus finds himself drawn into a careful, letter-by-letter courtship with the woman who discovers love for the first time.
Set against the rigid social rules and quiet cruelties of Regency England, The Jilt is a story about a woman who loses everything Society told her to want and discovers, in losing it, exactly who she is.
The Jilt is Book 1 of The Graces, a Regency series following Grace and each of her five pupils as they navigate Society, scandal, and the search for lives that are truly their own.
The Jilt
The Graces Series, Book One
The Kidnapped
The Graces Series, Book Two
The Bluestocking
The Graces Series, Book Three
The Twin
The Graces Series, Book Four
About the Author
I write Regency historical romance with the precision of a historian and the heart of a lifelong reader.
Before I wrote fiction, I spent my career as a historian and museum curator at state history museums, writing carefully and accurately about the real things people leave behind: artifacts, records, and the evidence of lives lived. I grew up reading Georgette Heyer, Jane Austen, and Phyllis Whitney, among others. I wrote romantic short stories as a teenager. A college professor told me I should write professionally.
I did not, for a long time.
When I came back to fiction at retirement, encouraged by my sister to write in the style of authors I had loved since childhood, I brought everything I had learned with me: a historian’s eye for period detail, a curator’s instinct for what matters, and decades of reading the best Regency writers who ever put pen to paper.
My Regency novels are set in a world I have spent decades studying. The social rules are real. The historical details are earned. And the women at the center of my stories refuse to be defined by what Society expects of them.
My first series, The Etonians, is a complete five-book Regency romance series. My second series, The Graces, follows Grace Trelawny and each of her five seminary pupils as they navigate propriety, love, and the quiet courage it takes to build a life on your own terms.
If you enjoy Austenesque fiction, intelligent heroines, and romance built on patience and letters rather than convenience, I think we will get along very well.
