She was eighteen when she posed for the Albert Memorial. Ten years later she was living under the walls of the grimmest prison in England.
Montreal, 1865. Sleighs wait in the snow-covered street as the colonial elite arrive at the Theatre Royal for a fancy dress ball. Inside, queens, knights templar and pirates wander past, but as the band strikes up a waltz and dancers begin to whirl around the floor one girl stands out.
Blonde, blue-eyed and corseted to within an inch of her life, ‘Nannie’ Price is the toast of the garrison town. The young officers cannot take their eyes off her, and their elderly commander insists on sending her to London to pose for the figure of Canada on the Albert Memorial. To the despair of her mother, she turns down two proposals, and becomes close to the illegitimate son of the Queen's cousin.
Later, faced with the realities of life in Victorian England, she marries. Her husband becomes a prison governor, and as she watches gangs of half-starved prisoners file past her house to dig out the vast Chatham dockyards, Nannie must fight depression and illness to remake her life.
The true story of a Victorian wild child, the men she married – and the man she loved.