Despite this, he finds himself almost drawn with unusual passion to Sayre's disliked half-sister, Lady Sylvanie, who appears to share many of Elizabeth Bennet's charms and characteristics.

Revealed, Lady Sayre kills herself, but not before forcing Darcy to face his own darker nature and his deeply hidden desires for revenge on George Wickham.

Duty and Desire takes place during Mr. Darcy's long absence from the plot of Pride and Prejudice, and is the most thematically independent of the "Gentleman" trilogy.

However, most of the issues Darcy encounters—his struggle to understand and help his sister, his realisation of who his real friends are, his failure to interest himself in other women—are crucial to his future success in reaching out to Elizabeth.

At the beginning of the novel, Georgiana Darcy receives a Christmas present from her aunt of a novel about "a mother and her three daughters...cast out upon the world by a heartless stepson and his odious wife".