Gnädiges Fräulein

They will tell you that Laura Abbot was born to privilege-an aristocrat's daughter, raised among salons and scholars, her father a radical mind, her mother of noble French blood. They will say she had every prospect of comfort, of marriage, of a life behind brocade curtains and candlelit dinners.

But that is not the story you will find here.

This is the story of a girl who bent her back over stone floors until her hands blistered, who scrubbed with boiling water until her knees bled, who learned silence under the sharp eye of those meant to guide her. It is the story of how cruelty pressed against her spirit, and how she-frail as glass, strong as tempered steel-endured.

Within the wards of Vienna, where suffering and birth lived side by side, Laura Abbot did not remain the noble child of her name. She became something more dangerous, more enduring: a midwife. A healer of women. A keeper of life in its rawest, most perilous moments.

This book is not only her trials, but her transformation-how the Dove of her father's words learned to mask her sorrow, to endure the lash of envy and authority, and, through it all, to rise higher than any had thought she could. Not by right of birth, but by fire of endurance.

Gnädiges Fräulein is her story. And once you have walked with her through the corridors of blood and stone, you will not forget her