Bellfont Legacy Books in Order

The Bellfont Legacy is Nadine Dorries’s step into nineteenth‑century industrial Britain, set in and around the fictional mill town of Bellfont, somewhere between Liverpool and Manchester. The opening novel, A Wicked Woman, lays the groundwork for a planned multi‑book family saga that follows rival mill dynasties and the women caught between love, duty and power.

Bellfont is a town built on cotton at a moment when the industry is both booming and under threat. Steam power and iron ships are changing trade, and the American Civil War looms, threatening the supply of raw cotton. Two powerful men stand on either side of this shift: Thomas Cartwright, a thoughtful mill owner who worries about the workers his fortune depends on, and Ernest Roscow, a hard, driven rival who sees people mainly as cogs in his business.

Their long‑standing hatred and a buried secret between their families form the fault line the series explores.

A Wicked Woman introduces another family drawn into this feud: the Jollys. Sisters Beatrice and Lydia are preparing for marriage, but under very different circumstances. Lydia is deeply in love with the man she is about to marry. Beatrice, engaged to Sebastian Roscow, is not. She has accepted him partly to avoid becoming the unmarried daughter expected to care for her widowed father, rather than from any true affection.

On the eve of Beatrice’s wedding, a chance encounter brings the shock of real, immediate attraction, forcing her to question everything she thought she had settled. From there the story becomes a tangle of loyalties, with Beatrice pulled between the safety of an advantageous match and the possibility of building a different life, while the Cartwright and Roscow empires jostle for control of Bellfont’s future.

With A Wicked Woman launching the story, the series is designed as a broad, sweeping saga. Readers can expect crowded mills and gracious drawing rooms, union meetings and family dinners, sharp class divides and moments when those divides are briefly crossed. As in Dorries’s other work, strong women stand at the centre of events, navigating the expectations placed on them in a society that rarely gives them the final say.

The Bellfont Legacy promises to follow these families – and the secret that binds them – over many years. If you enjoy historical sagas built around industry, class rivalry and complicated romances, this series offers that mix in a Lancashire setting rather than the Liverpool streets and Irish villages of Dorries’s earlier books.