** spoiler alert ** This book is generally acknowledged as the very first sexed-up historical romance ever published, the book that begat an entire sub-genre and made Katherine E. Woodiwiss a household name. It's the original Old-Skool romance, and bears all the hallmarks of it: the characters are cardboard cutouts who move through the scenery, behaving in ways dictated by the demands of the plot; the hero is an alpha male (aka "complete jerk"), the heroine is spiritless, cowardly, and submissive, but is possessed of Magic, Mostly Exposed Breasts of Universal Hornitude. The situations they find themselves in are highly improbable if not downright laughable. And the sex, well, the sex is frequent, often violent (rape fantasies indulged within!), not very interestingly written, and contributes little to the development of either character or plot.

This book was first published in 1972, and probably succeeded because it was so different from everything else on the market at the time. However, there is a lot about it that doesn't stand up under modern scrutiny, quite apart from the poor characterization and the rape-fantasy sex. The writing, for instance, is pretty uniformly awful; the style is immature and unevolved, horribly wordy, and involves a great deal more 'telling' than 'showing. I've read a lot of unpublished fiction – including the efforts of my own teenage years – written this way, and though the clumsiness of the prose provokes derisive laughter, that doesn't make reading it a pleasure.

The prose soars off into flights of fancy and floweriness whenever love is being discussed or thought about. Language becomes antiquated (which is really saying something when your book starts off in 1799 England), involving "thee" and "thou" and the stringing together of phrases that don't flow well and thus clang on the ear. I like me some complex phraseology, but more than once I was left wondering what a sentence meant, even after several rereads. On prose alone, this book is at least 30% longer than it ought to be; any page from within provides plenty of material group work in a workshop on Making Your Words Work.

I think the ebook version that I got from the library must have been made into a PDF using OCR text recognition. I can think of no other explanation for the description of the furniture in the hero's family home as including a "Lows XIV" chair, or glitches like "ladened ship" and "did as bidded".

The other aspects of epic fail in this book are manifold. The depiction of blacks in the South in 1800 is positively cringeworthy, especially in the person the head servant at the hero's home, an enormous woman called Hatti (probably a nod to Hattie McDaniel, whose image the character's name and description brings to mind), who addresses her master's new bride as "honey child" rather than the more likely "Mrs. Birmingham", and addresses the husband as "Master Bran" or "Master Brandon" rather than the more appropriate "Mr. Birmingham". (I'm taking my cues on this from Gone With the Wind, admittedly, but I find it improbable that the formality of address and clear separation of servant and master classes in the 1860's weren't also in place at the turn of that century.) More excruciating still was the depiction of Hatti's dialect, which included the expressions "yassah" [yes sir] and "massah" [master]". Granted, Roots wouldn't be published for a couple of years yet, but I found the depiction of the servants to be weirdly at odds with the assertion that Brandon Birmingham's black servants were not slaves, since in 1800, fewer than 10% of all blacks in the South were free men or women. I mean, I suppose it's possible, but it would have been extremely unusual, and probably a significant talking point in Charleston society. And yet? Hardly a mention, apart from the one time. Missed opportunity for some depth, there. Still, since this was the first historical romance ever published, Woodiwiss was at complete liberty to play fast and loose with history, and hardly a reader in a thousand would have been any the wiser, in the days before Roots, Ken Burns, and the internet.

The heroine spends much of the book either partially or wholly naked, the better to showcase the Magic Boobs of Universal Hornitude. The cruel aunt she lives with at the beginning, jealous of her beauty, forces Heather to wear her cast-off gowns, which are far too big and thus show off the splendor of her bosom every time she bends over. The aunt's brother takes her to London and dresses her in a flesh-toned gown that reveals more than it conceals of her body, with the intention of turning her into a prostitute. The heroine escapes from him into the entirely unfamiliar streets of London, where she's mistaken for the sort of woman she's dressed as, and taken aboard a ship, whose captain literally rips her clothes off for the next several hours. She mostly gets to keep her clothes on as they cross the Atlantic to America, but the exposed bosom gets plenty of exposure on the new shores.

The heroine, Heather, is an absolute Mary Sue. She's tiny and perfectly formed, and just the sight of her is enough to make almost every man she meets forget his manners, and indeed his common sense, and think of nothing else but the pleasure of ravishing her. I found this hard to understand, because Heather hasn't so much as a spark of wit or grit or backbone, and spends much of the book cowering from one imagined threat or other, either physical or emotional. However, hardly a man between the ages of fifteen and eighty in this book isn't similarly affected by her, for all that she's only eighteen, and heavily pregnant by the time she meets any of the ones in America. Such is the power of the Magic Bosom. Even the hero's younger brother is inappropriately lustful toward his new sister-in-law, and random members of the male population of Charleston pop up regularly to variously, leer, paw, and attempt to rape.

Nobody in this book has anything even vaguely resembling common courtesy or manners, which is a great pity, because it was a very constrained age, and the applying the manners of the time would have helped to add some dimension to many of the characters. Instead, they behave like character outlines from Central Casting, and everything devolves into ridiculous melodrama at the end, with attempted blackmail, attempted seduction, attempted rape (again), and the revelation of a serial rapist-murderer on the loose in Charleston all rearing their ugly heads in the last chapter.

That said, there's not a lot of real tension in the book. Many great opportunities for creating conflict and tension seem to have been purposely bypassed, for whatever reason (possibly lest they prove more interesting than the alleged relationship between Heather and Brandon). There's a jilted fiancée who, properly used, could have been much more trouble, much more of a threat to the protagonists' emotional, physical, and financial security. There's a murdered uncle back in England that should have been more of a spectre. Even when Brandon is arrested for murder, it's so completely ludicrous and obviously wrong that it engenders eye-rolling rather than worry in the reader.

On one hand, I'm glad I read this book, because it's contributed to my understanding of a part of the genre that I completely missed out on. I was a pre-teen when this was published, and even if my mother read it, I was never interested in the books she read, at that age. I didn't start reading romances until the late 1970's/early 1980's, and the ones that crossed my path then were mostly the virginal categories by Harlequin.

On the other hand, I'm glad to be done reading this thing, because it was tedious and unremittingly awful in so many ways, and being done means I never need to read this, or any other Old Skool romance, ever again.