Edie Cay

Edie Cay writes Regency historical romance with particular attention to women whose ambitions challenge the limits of their period. The Boxer and the Blacksmith is the second novel in her When the Blood Is Up sequence and appeared in 2021. Its central figure, Bess Abbott, competes as a boxer, while Os Worley works as a blacksmith. The book’s sporting history draws on Elizabeth Wilkinson Stokes, a documented eighteenth-century fighter who helped inspire Cay’s central boxer. The title belongs to Cay’s romance bibliography as the sequence’s second volume. The pairing of ring and forge gives the novel two forms of skilled physical labor, but its wider interest lies in community, reputation, and the right to define a useful life. Cay’s research-led premise brings an overlooked strand of women’s sporting history into a Regency narrative. The Boxer and the Blacksmith also extends the social world established by the first series volume while keeping Bess’s profession central to her identity.