"I was bought as a slave and for a slave," Dolly told her daughters at bedtime. "Your father never loved me." DOLLY VARDON is the story of a pretty orphan girl's struggle to survive in turn-of-the-century London and Paris; dancing in the streets for pennies, begging, stealing, and the dark side of Victorian England - one of the most horrendous eras of prostitution in the modern world. A chance encounter brings Dolly - the poorest of the poor - together with Harry Sidney Nichols, wealthy publisher and dealer of the rarest books, and publisher of books of every variety of sexual diversion and perversion at a time when printing and selling clandestine erotica was highly illegal. Bound together by Harry's fetish for the tiny foot and shoe, Dolly is introduced to a world of luxury and debauchery she never imagined. But there is a price, and it haunts Dolly Vardon all her life, through three generations of a dysfunctional family saga. DOLLY VARDON is based on the many tales that Dolly told to her daughters, her lovers, and to the author, one of her many grandchildren.