Mary Kingswood's Blog, page 19

Review: The Season by Sophia Holloway (2022)

I’ve read a couple of previous books by the author, and enjoyed them, so this was an automatic buy. Mind you, I nearly gave up on it early on, because it was as slow as treacle (molasses), and without a drop of humour. But somewhere in the middle, when both the protagonists have settled into life in London and the surrounding side characters have stepped into the limelight a little, the whole thing takes off to a new level, and it was both very funny and deeply absorbing.

Here’s the premise: Henrietta Gaydon is a country girl, happy living with her widower father, and with neighbour Charles, Lord Henfield, as a friend since childhood. She is offered the chance of a London season, and so off she goes to her aunt to be dressed and otherwise prepared for her campaign to find a husband. That is, after all, the purpose of the season, and while Henrietta loves the social whirl, she’s not at all sure she wants to marry and leave her papa behind and perhaps live far from her childhood home.

So far, this reminds me of Heyer’s Arabella, also a tale of a simple country girl summoned to London to make a splendid match. And in both cases, they find themselves feted and admired. Henrietta has a useful inheritance as well as beauty, but growing up in an all-male environment, and particularly sparring often with Charles, she’s not overwhelmed by the attentions of flirtatious men, and gains a reputation as something of an original, not the usual simpering debutante.

This part of the story was rather too long for my taste. Nowadays, the season is rather a tired trope of Regencies, and it takes some unusual angle to make it about more than gowns and walks in Hyde Park and vouchers for Almack’s, which have been done to death. Fortunately, Charles the friend and neighbour follows Henrietta to town. He’s noticed for some time now that Henrietta has grown up and is just the woman he’d love to marry, and he’s determined to try his luck and see if he can’t win her for himself. But the Henrietta he meets in London is nothing like the easy-going companion from home. She’s become a sophisticated woman, able to fence verbally with her many admirers, and the easy camaraderie they shared is hard to rediscover.

I did feel for Charles, and of course Henrietta starts to have feelings for him, but is at a loss to know whether he sees her the same way. Regency manners are sometimes so restrained that a couple can end up completely at cross purposes. I’m a great believer in openness in such cases, and I think Charles should have made his intentions clear right from the start, rather than trusting to his own charm to bring Henrietta round. His reticence left Henrietta in a difficult position, not knowing whether to accept a good offer now, or to reject it and hope for the one she really wants later (the perennial problem of Regency heroines).

Beautifully written, and for once the comparison with Heyer is very apt. There was a strange subplot that veered off in an odd direction at the end, which seemed to be set up solely to place the hero in a situation of maximum confusion for the heroine, but everything comes right eventually, and I loved some of the side characters, particularly the two redoubtable matrons, whose decades long feud almost trips up the minor romance. A good four stars, recommended for those who don’t mind a slow, gently weaving story.

Review: The Wild Child by Mary Jo Putney (1999)

A curious book, with elements of False Colours, by Heyer, but very much in its own style. A little too emotional for my taste, and only lightly rooted in the Regency, but Putney can really write, so I enjoyed it overall.

Here’s the premise: Dominic Renbourne is the second son of the Earl of Wrexham, the spare by just ten minutes. His twin Kyle got the courtesy title and the expectations, while Dominic joined the army and survived (just) the horrors of Waterloo. The two drifted apart when they were sent to different schools, and then fell out spectacularly when Kyle went to Oxford and Dominic refused to join him there and train for the church, preferring a more active career in the army. But now Kyle needs a favour from his identical twin – to take his place on a visit to court the Lady Meriel Grahame, whom Kyle plans to marry for her vast fortune. It should be easy because the lady is disconnected from reality, so neither she nor the elderly ladies looking after her will know the difference.

Despite his reluctance, Dominic is induced to agree to it, but he arrives at Warfield Manor to discover, not the madwoman he’d feared, but a beautiful creature entirely at one with nature and the stunning garden she’s created. This part of the book is glorious, as Dominic delicately gets to know his brother’s intended bride and learns to respect and admire her, while she responds unexpectedly to his overtures. It’s hard to convey just how magical an atmosphere Putney creates, with the garden itself a glorious part of the other-worldliness.

It’s unfortunate that the lady’s response is the one so beloved of many Regency authors, in that she gets the hots for him. This is a perfectly innocent and other-worldly girl, who has observed the wild creatures mating, takes one look at Dominic’s manly body, and decides she’d like some of that, thank you very much. And he, being the hero of a Regency novel, naturally had trouble keeping himself from jumping her at once. There’s no intellectual rapport built up between them, nor could there be since she doesn’t talk at all to anyone. Instead it’s all about sex.

For me, that’s a disappointment, and gradually, as she begins to trust him and allows herself to be drawn out from her self-imposed seclusion, I found it increasingly difficult to believe any of it. It’s all beautifully done, because Putney is a virtuoso, but to me after a unique and enchanting start, it became a conventional love-overcomes-all tale. There’s a lot of angst along the way, but since Dominic never overcomes his lust enough to do the decent thing and leave Meriel alone, he lost a lot of his heroic gloss, for me. Then he has to confess that he’s been living a lie, and also confess to his brother that he’s been bedding the woman Kyle was supposed to marry. Then at the end there’s some melodramatic business with Meriel’s rival guardians, which had some wobbly logic in it, but never mind.

To be honest, the most moving part of the whole book for me was not Meriel and Dominic at all, but Kyle’s love for his mistress of many years, and what he was prepared to do for her. That was a great love story, whereas Dominic and Meriel were all about lust.

Still, Putney’s writing is awesome, and if the book was only lightly connected to the Regency (apart from Dominic’s history at Waterloo, it could have been set at any time over a two hundred year long period), at least there were no historical errors that I noticed. An absorbing read, even if not totally convincing to me. Four stars.

Review: A Match For Elizabeth by Mira Stables (1972)

A pleasantly undemanding book that runs on predictable rails from the outset, marred only by some minor plot contrivances and one eye-rollingly bad decision by the heroine. Fortunately, the hero is my favourite kind, the sensible and honourable sort, who more or less redeems everything single handedly.

Here’s the premise: Richard, the Earl of Anderley, is called to the deathbed of an old friend, to discover that he’s been named as guardian to the friend’s daughter. Not that she needs a guardian, since she’s twenty-three, but let that pass. Elizabeth has been under the impression that she was illegitimate. Now she’s to be told that she is actually legitimate, although in a secret and underage ceremony of dubious legality, but let that pass, too. Richard is charged with bringing the girl to her rightful place in society and finding her a husband, and quite why her father neglected to do that himself is beyond me.

Richard accepts the guardianship and sets about his appointed tasks. His sister Mary is called upon to rig Elizabeth out in suitable style, but refuses to introduce her to society. Maybe next year, she says. So Richard whisks Elizabeth off to the country, but he’s not prepared to wait a year, since she’s 23 already. Happily, he has a nephew, Timothy, (Mary’s son) who is the right sort of age, and a pleasant, agreeable sort of man. He’s a bit rakish, but no doubt he’ll settle in time. He’s also Richard’s heir, so it all seems very providential. Elizabeth is very antagonistic towards Richard, resenting being torn away from her simple farming roots and his control over her, but she seems to take a shine to Timothy. So, marriage problem solved. Or is it?

Two problems emerge to mar this seemingly perfect arrangement. Firstly, when Timothy is invited to get to know Elizabeth better at a house party Richard has helpfully organised, he falls madly in love with the brainless but very pretty daughter of a neighbour. So… back to the drawing board on the marriage front, but there’s a young marquis who might do…

The second problem is that Richard finds himself falling for Elizabeth himself. Now, this seems a bit skeevy in a man with a nephew of 25 or so, whom everyone (including himself) talks about as if he were practically in his dotage. He tells himself he’s far too old for Elizabeth and resolutely suppresses his feeling, soldiering on with his project to find her a husband her own age. Whereupon we discover that he’s a full twenty years younger than his sisters, and is actually only 35. Since when is 35 too old and decrepit to think of marriage, especially to a 23-year-old?

Eventually, like the reader, he comes to realise that he’s not too old for her at all, she seems to have dropped her initial antagonism towards him and so he decides to try his luck. And she promptly refuses him, because reasons. What possible reason can there be? The usual one – the author wanted to spin out the plot and introduce some melodrama, so the heroine gets to have her outbreak of stupid, while I restrained the impulse to hurl my Kindle at the wall. Sigh.

Needless to say, everything comes right in the end, although not before another deluge of highly implausible melodrama, but the final scenes are beautifully romantic, so the story ends on a fine high note that had me grinning in delight. As with all Stables’ work, this is beautifully written and despite the overwrought plot contrivances, worthy of four stars.

Review: A Garden Folly by Candice Hern (1997)

This book made me very angry. Ranty review ahoy. And also kind of spoilery, so don’t read it if you don’t want to know anything. It should be said right at the outset that this is no reflection on the author’s writing ability. I’ve read other books of hers and enjoyed them thoroughly, so this is one of those occasional hiccups, where this particular book is an epic fail for me personally, but it’s just a weird clash of my expectations with the particular characters in this particular story.

Here’s the premise: Catherine Forsythe and her beautiful (if slightly dim) elder sister Susannah have been left destitute by their father’s death. They’ve been taken in by their Aunt Hetty, a widow with a small jointure, and for two years the three of them have been living an increasingly hand to mouth existence in a tiny house in Chelsea, such that even the furniture is being slowly sold off and they’re living on onion broth.

Now stop right there for a minute. Selling furniture? And why is it that these two healthy, able-bodied girls are reducing their impoverished aunt to even greater impoverishment, which seems likely to put all of them in the workhouse? Susannah is adept with a needle, so why isn’t she making some money from her stitchery? Catherine is the clever one (supposedly) so why isn’t she a governess or paid companion or a teacher somewhere? Why are they dragging their aunt into the mire, too?

But let that pass. I’ll allow a book its basic premise, however implausible. Anyway, Aunt Hetty happens to bump into an old school friend one day, who happens to be a dowager duchess, who happens to be planning a house party, and who happens to be a charitable soul. She invites Hetty and the two girls to spend a month at the ducal estate, a month of mingling with eligible and rich young gentlemen. Catherine sees the possibilities at once. Susannah, with her looks, will attract a rich suitor and they’ll all be saved. The duke himself won’t be there, as he’s famously reclusive, but there will be fifty or so other guests.

They manage to scrape together enough dresses to pass muster as well as a carriage (more on this later), and off they go, and within no time flat there’s a misunderstanding and the shortsighted Susannah has taken a shine to the wildly ineligible steward of the estate, an ex-soldier with only one arm, instead of all the rich and titled guests. So it’s all down to Catherine to rescue them from starvation.

Meanwhile, Catherine has gone wandering off into the gardens to admire the flowers and trips over a gardener, or rather he trips over her, sending her flying. They have a brief spat, until he discovers she’s knowledgeable about plants and decides he quite likes her after all. And so they fall into a very pleasant guest/gardener relationship. What she doesn’t know (but we do, because it’s never a secret) is that he’s not Stephen Archibald, head gardener, but Stephen, the Duke of Carlisle, skulking about the gardens he loves, because he can’t bear being the focus of attention as the duke. And although he’s thirty-two, and very marriageable, he’s determined never to marry, unless he can find someone to love him for himself, and not be interested in his title and wealth.

Well, we can see where this is going, can’t we? This part of the book is charming, as the two bond over interesting plants. He sends her posies of violets and painting equipment. She paints, and artlessly tells him her plans to marry a rich man so that she’ll never have to live on onion broth again. And her target just happens to be the duke’s best buddy, Miles, the Earl of Strickland. Miles is a widower with two small daughters, and although he doesn’t expect to find love again, he’d like to find someone to mother his girls. It all sounds perfect, and everything is going along swimmingly until Stephen starts to get jealous of his own friend, and ends up kissing Catherine. This is actually a wonderfully romantic scene, perfectly judged, where he basically says: look at him and look at me, and tell me if you don’t, deep down, truly prefer me?

Now, that’s fine, but then Stephen goes completely off the rails and starts (in essence) stalking Catherine, lurking in the shrubbery to entice her away from the other guests she’s supposed to be with, especially from the tempting Miles, and kissing her passionately. Because he just can’t help himself, apparently. She tries to explain her situation, and how horrible it is to be wondering whether you can actually afford food, but he takes no notice. He has to make her love him for himself. He just can’t help himself, you see.

Now I totally get that he wants to be loved for himself, I really do. It’s very understandable, but it kind of goes with the territory of being a duke, and hugely wealthy, that everyone you meet is aware of that, and behaves differently around you. Because, actually, you are different. There’s no way that being raised at that level of society makes a man no different from, say, a plain old gardener. Which is why dukes tend to marry the daughters of other dukes, who just aren’t that dazzled by the vast estates and armies of retainers and whatnot.

But the one thing Regency gentlemen are brought up to have is restraint. Stephen certainly CAN help himself, because losing control is such a breach of etiquette. And then there’s the question of morals and ethics and honour, for heaven’s sake. Catherine has made it very plain that she’s determined to ensure a secure financial future for herself and her family, she only has a month in which to do it and Stephen leaping out of bushes with his smoking hot kisses is an unwelcome distraction, to put it mildly. The problem might be resolved if she could manage to resist him for five seconds, but she can’t help herself either. {Rolls eyes}

There are about a dozen ways Stephen could have addressed the problem honourably, even without telling Catherine the whole truth. He could have told Miles about the situation (and absolutely should have told him that they were both courting the same girl, see point about honour, above). He could have got his mother involved. He could have got Aunt Hetty involved. He could have pointed out that a head gardener on a ducal estate is not exactly penniless, living in a hovel. Or he could have done the decent thing and left Catherine alone (as she repeatedly asked) to follow her own best interests.
Or he could have told her the truth, and let her decide for herself what she wanted to do. You know, treating her with respect as a rational human being. That would have been nice. Not to mention a better foundation for marriage than continuing to trick her, winding her up into such a state of confusion that she spends the last few chapters crying.

But no, what he actually does, after forcing her to decide that she’d rather live in poverty with him than in luxury with Miles (silly girl), he does something unspeakably cruel. What he should do, of course, is to confess that he’s the duke so she won’t have to live in a hovel after all, and after thumping him for putting her through all that agonising for no good reason, she’d laugh and forgive him. But he doesn’t do that. He decides for some unfathomable reason to reveal his identity to her in public, at a ball, with an announcement of their betrothal.

This right here is what makes me so angry. The rest of it I could just about stomach, if he had only come clean straight away. But no, he had to humiliate her in front of a houseful of snooty guests, whereupon she faints, and when she comes round, instead of slapping his insufferable face and walking out on him, she forgives him. Silly girl. Ugh.

Now, Catherine doesn’t exactly cover herself with glory, either, since she allowed herself to be pulled into the bushes for those passionate kisses every single time. And she never works out that a head gardener (as she supposes him to be) is multiple rungs higher up the ladder than a farm labourer and she wouldn’t exactly be living in abject poverty if she married him. A head gardener would be paid a decent salary and provided with a cottage and as much food as he and his wife and ten children can eat. Ducal estates are virtually self-sufficient, producing enough food to feed hundreds of retainers, and support any number of tenant farmers, craftsmen, etc. Nobody starves, or lives on onion broth. If Susannah can marry the steward without anyone turning a hair, the supposed gardener can marry, too. Most of her disdain seems to be simple class prejudice – he’s an unworthy husband for the granddaughter of a viscount.

Then there are the relations who realise what’s going on and never think to intervene, apart from cryptically telling Catherine to follow her heart, and laughing at her.

And then there’s MacDougal. This strange character is a servant of Catherine and her sister, who seems to have a magical ability to make things happen. He finds the odd leg of mutton for them when times are hard, and when the invitation arrives, manages to track down all sorts of discarded things (gowns, jewels, a carriage) to rig them out for the occasion. He mills about the garden, too, and his is one of the voices telling Catherine to follow her heart. Who is he? It’s never explained. On the author’s website, she says he can be whoever the reader wants him to be, which is not exactly helpful.

I seem to have written an essay here, because this book really did get me riled up, but I have to say I quite enjoyed it, too. The writing is beautiful, it’s just that the characters behaved in ways that seemed beyond the pale to me. Now it might be that the author intended this as some sort of whimsical rags-to-riches fairytale, and I’m completely missing the point. That’s perfectly possible. But frankly, the overriding theme seems to be – love is all that matters and never mind about boring practicalities like having enough money to live on, and that’s not a philosophy I can ever subscribe to.

As I said upfront, I’ve read other Candice Hern books and thoroughly enjoyed them, but this one is lucky to scrape two stars from me.

Review: Emma Disposes by Mira Stables (1972)

An odd little book, rather uneven, with a straightforward romance, some very convenient coincidences and a whole heap of melodrama. It’s safe to say a lot of buckles were swashed (or swashes were buckled, not sure which). But a very enjoyable read, for all that, and a real page turner.

Here’s the premise: Captain Charles Trevannion is a career soldier committed to seeing off Bonaparte in Spain, but he’s recalled, under protest, to England to investigate some traitorous goings on near his old home in Sussex. Someone is getting secret information to the Frenchies, and it Must Be Stopped. His grandfather recently died, so that will do as an excuse for him coming home. He and his trusty batman, Giles, decide to stop for the night at an inn run by Giles’s brother, Jasie, but when they find the place all closed up and Charles sneaks in through a window, he finds himself bopped on the head. And so, rather inauspiciously, the hero and heroine meet.

This book was written in 1972, so it conforms to many Regencies of the era in that the heroine is a fairly naive seventeen-year-old, and the hero is a worldly-wise thirty-two. The heroine is Nell Easton, an orphan, her only relative in the world a generic wicked uncle, who wants to get his hands on her fortune. But Nell is being cared for by Jasie and his wife, Emma (the Emma of the title), and it’s Emma who comes up with the Cunning Ploy to protect Nell and allow Charles to snoop around on his own quest – she and Charles must pretend to be betrothed.

This has the usual effect in Regencies, that the two are thrown together a great deal, and begin to fall in love. So far, so predictable. But when Nell’s wicked uncle arrives on the scene, things get messy very quickly, and only a great deal of derring-do by our swashbuckling hero resolves things satisfactorily, with happy endings for almost all the good guys, and the usual comeuppance for the villain.

Some quibbles. About halfway through the book, everyone starts calling Charles ‘Sir Charles’. I suppose, since the grandfather was Sir Nicholas, Charles has inherited a baronetcy as well as the estate, but it’s never mentioned explicitly. In the Regency, it was vitally important to know everyone’s rank (so you know precisely how low to bow or curtsy, and whether you can call on someone or should wait for them to condescend to call on you), and so too for readers of Regency romances. If he was a baronet, then he was Captain Sir Charles Trevannion, and that should have been made clear from the start.

As for Nell, she’s made out to be a good little soldier’s daughter, practical and not at all stupid, and then she has to go and fall for the oldest trick in the book, and put herself into the power of the wicked uncle, needing a number of people to risk their lives to rescue her. Silly girl. But this book was written fifty years ago, so silly heroines were very much a thing, then. And it allowed the hero to be manly and clever and suitably heroic, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain too much. Although I did wonder how it was, when there was only one way in and out of the old house where she was held, Charles managed to go back in and rescue a fallen comrade via a different route. Strange.

There isn’t much to nail the story to the Regency era, apart from the status of the war with Napoleon, and since the story was set deep in the Sussex countryside, nothing felt off to me. There were a lot of minor editing issues, but more careless punctuation or missing words rather than actual typos. It just felt sloppy, as if it had missed a final proofread. But nothing that bothered me overmuch. The romance was very much of the restrained type common to the era. If you’re looking for an emotional roller-coaster, best look elsewhere. In this book, the drama is all in the plot, not the characters angsting. There’s a lot of head-hopping, so we always know what the villain is thinking and plotting, which ramps up the tension somewhat artificially. One thing that is striking about books of this era is their lack of squeamishness, so death is not necessarily restricted to the villains. There were a couple of deaths in this book that raised my eyebrows, one human (before the start of the book but described in gruesome detail) and one canine (and distressingly onscreen). I know it’s necessary to establish the depths of the villains’ depravity, but I felt that could have been done more subtly. If this would distress you, be warned.

Overall, an enjoyable if old fashioned read, heavy on action and light on character depth, and pretty good considering it was Mira Stables’ first book. Four stars.

Review: The Diabolical Baron by Mary Jo Putney (1987)

This is a very early Putney, possibly her first publication. My only previous contact with her work was The Rake, which I liked for the passion between the protagonists and disliked almost everything else about it. This I liked much, much more, although with a few little niggles, and one major problem.

Here’s the premise: Jason Kincaid, Lord Radford, is thirty-five years old, and is the usual sort of super-charged hero for the era – rich, handsome, a Corinthian, arrogant and completely selfish. But duty is catching up with him, and he knows it’s time he married and got himself an heir. He’s not interested in a love match, after a love affair went disastrously wrong some years ago. He’s never found anyone to compare with that first love, so he’s happy to settle for any respectable girl. He doesn’t know one from another, so he asks his friend George Fitzwilliam to draw up a shortlist and he picks a name from a hat. To spice things up, he makes a wager with Fitzwilliam on the outcome.

The name he picks out is Miss Caroline Hanscombe. He knows nothing about her, beyond her eligibility, but he sets out with single-minded determination to court and win her. Caroline is a quiet, self-effacing person, happy to lose herself in her music, which she not only plays but also composes. It’s her solace in a life that’s not particularly enjoyable. She’s going through the motions of a season, in support of her younger half-sister, Gina, but all she wants is to retire to live with her beloved aunt and write her music. Lord Radford’s pursuit confuses her, the baron himself frightens her, she doesn’t love him and she certainly doesn’t want to marry him. But her father and step-mother put her under intense pressure and she feels obliged to accept his proposal.

So far, we seem to be heading for a standard marriage of convenience story, but not so. There are two other people to play a role in this story. One is Captain Richard Davenport, returning from war to the neighbouring estate to Radford’s, who is just as musical as Caroline. The other is Caroline’s aunt, Jessica, a widow, who just happens to be Radford’s long-lost first love. And so we find ourselves in a different trope, the betrothed-to-the-wrong-person story, as Caroline gradually falls in love with Richard, and Jason finds himself just as drawn as before to Jessica, who is every bit as super-charged as he is.

In many ways, this reminds me of Heyer’s Bath Tangle, with the same two pairs, one vibrant and high-spirited, the other quiet and gentle, with a mismatched betrothal to be sorted out. Naturally, as in that book, so with this, the tangle is eventually unravelled and the characters end up in the right pairings. Even though it’s obvious that it will work out, somehow, it’s still pretty emotional for the participants as they wrestle with their consciences and try to do the right thing.

I think it could have been sorted a lot more easily if Caroline had had the gumption to go to Jason and ask him directly just why he wanted to marry her. She assumed that he must feel something for her, even though he didn’t show it, but that was pretty naive of her. Many Regency marriages were pragmatic affairs, and a man of that age and temperament might very well prefer that sort of arrangement. If she’d learnt that she was just a random choice, she could have jilted him a lot more easily. Mind you, that would have been a fairly tame ending. Putney’s actual solution was a lot more dramatic.

I mentioned some small niggles, and one major problem. Let me deal with the problem first. Richard is the heir to an earldom, but he arrives at the estate under a pseudonym while he decides whether he wants to take up the earldom or allow it to pass to the next in line. Erm… no. Big, big no-no. He’s the heir, and he doesn’t get to choose whether to take it or not. It’s his, and that’s the end of it. He can choose whether to claim the title officially or not, but he can’t pass it on or refuse it. He’s the earl, whether he likes it or not. The property is unentailed, so he can give that away if he chooses, but not the title. Unfortunately, the whole premise of the book is built around whether he becomes the earl or not.

The other niggles are trivial. There are a very few Americanisms, and also some surprising typos, which a halfway decent editor should have caught. I disliked that some of the background characters were pretty evil people, cartoonish villains without a redeeming feature amongst them, especially Caroline’s horrible father. In many ways, this would have been a more interesting and more powerful story if Caroline hadn’t been blackmailed into accepting Jason’s proposal, but had made the decision for herself, not enthusiastically, perhaps, but in a spirit of duty to help her family. I also wondered a little why Jason and Jessica gave up so easily on their early romance. He, at least, could have made some effort to find her. But that would have spoilt the whole story, so fair enough. And I suppose I could quibble about the length of time the four of them took to sort out their difficulties.

But very little of this mattered while I was reading. I was totally swept up in the story, feeling every nuance of their emotional highs and lows, quite unable to put the book down. I liked all the main characters, particularly the two ‘quiet’ ones, who were drawn with greater subtlety, I thought, and I loved all the musical detail. It made Caroline, in particular, feel very real. Putney is a powerful writer, and although this book wasn’t perfect, I can’t give it less than five stars.

Review: Devil’s Cub by Georgette Heyer (1932)

Lord, that was tedious. I know a lot of Heyer fans love this book, but apart from a brief moment in the middle, I strongly disliked pretty much everything about it. An obnoxious hero, a wildly implausible plot, a stupid heroine and an array of boringly verbose side characters — yawn.

Here’s the premise: wild Dominic Alistair, the Marquis of Vidal, and heir to the Duke of Avon, has finally been forced to flee the country because of a duel. Deciding that he might as well have an amusing companion for the journey, he arranges to run off with Sophia Challoner, who’s been flirting outrageously with him and seems to be ripe for any mischief. She agrees to go to Paris with him as his mistress, although she hopes that the ensuing scandal will force him to marry her. But the arrangements are intercepted by Sophia’s older sister Mary, who decides to save her sister from such a terrible fate by running off with Vidal herself. Naturally, she expects him to send her promptly home when he discovers the deception, and is horrified when he shrugs, says in essence, ‘You’ll do just as well’, and forces her to go to France with him. It’s only when she shoots him in desperation that he realises she isn’t as morally dubious as her sister.

And this is where the book veers off the rails of credibility. Having confidently assured his parents that there’s no danger of him being forced to marry the so-bourgeois Sophia, he now decides that he absolutely must marry Mary, who may be more protective of her virtue but is still just as bourgeois as her sister. This made zero sense to me, frankly. She’s still a nobody who chose to run away with him, so there’s absolutely no need for any question of marriage, especially from a future duke. And frankly, nothing about Vidal suggests that he has the slightest interest in honourable behaviour, since he’s been an arrogant, violent, selfish and thoroughly horrible person from page 1. And since Mary declares that she doesn’t want to marry him anyway, you’d imagine that would let him off the hook.

However, the shooting ushers in the only part of the book that is remotely entertaining, in the manner of many later Heyers. Vidal is slightly injured by the shooting, and Mary takes charge of him, forcing him to see a doctor, to be bled and then to eat a bowl of gruel, and generally bossing him (and his servants) around and not taking no for an answer. The conversations between Vidal and Mary are priceless. I could have done with a lot more of that.

But then we get to Paris, where we encounter the sub-plot, Vidal’s cousin Juliana, who has fallen in love with another nobody, called Comyn, a painfully correct young man. Juliana is the sort of female who is all too frequent in Heyer’s works, being young and stupid and prone to fall into hysterics at the slightest provocation. I disliked her quite intensely. Comyn was rather funny, though. Add to this mix Vidal’s mother, the Duchess of Avon, or Leonie, the heroine of These Old Shades, who is happily not prone to hysterics, but instead spends most of the book repeatedly stating that Vidal must (or must not) marry one of other of the various women involved. There are a number of Vidal’s other relatives who put in an appearance, too, who also talk at great length about what Vidal and Leonie and Juliana (and who knows who else) should or should not do. I suspect that Heyer thought all this dialogue was very witty, but since it didn’t advance the plot one iota or illuminate the characters involved or (frankly) serve any purpose whatsoever, I beg to differ. And then there’s the Duke of Avon himself, of whom everyone is terrified, but here he’s no more than a fairly implausible plot device (he just happens to be at the right tiny little inn at the precise time he was needed? Really?).

As for Mary, what can I say about a woman who’s fallen in love yet refuses to marry the man because she’s not worthy of him? And keeps on refusing, even when he professes his love? Stupid girl. I’ve given this two stars because… well, it’s Georgette Heyer, so the writing is superb, as always. But the plot, the characters, the romance? Not so much. It just made me cross. But at least now I can tick it off my to-read list.

Review: Matchless Margaret by Christina Dudley (2021)

This is two parts Bath Tangle and two parts Cotillion, and a smidgeon of Northanger Abbey, but at the same time is entirely itself. Christina Dudley is surely one of the finest Regency authors around – original, clever, literate and very, very funny. Every book in this series is a delight, even though they are all completely different, and each one a unique masterpiece.

Here’s the premise: Margaret Hapgood is the third of the four daughters of Squire Hapgood of Bramleigh in Somersetshire. The two eldest are now married, the mother indulges in ill-health, so it falls to Margaret to manages the family’s affairs. This she does so thoroughly that when her uncle, Alwyn Arbuthnot, falls once more into financial difficulties, Margaret is deployed to take him to Bath, accompanied by her mother, to find him a wealthy bride so that he won’t be a drain on the squire’s purse any longer.

This he’s perfectly willing to do, so they find cheap lodgings – and almost the first person they meet is the wealthy widow he courted in London, whose son whisked her to safety out of the eager hands of Uncle Alwyn. The son, Dashiell Waite, is a soldier recovering from a leg injury received in the war with France, and he meets Margaret when she accidentally knocks his crutches from under him. He’s accompanied by his friend, Charles Haworth, another war-wounded ex-soldier, now the unexpected owner of a country estate. They are joined in Bath by Dashiell’s betrothed-from-the-cradle cousin, Charmaine Blakely, and her mother, and this little group form an uneasy friendship, fostered by Charmaine’s unexpected friendship for Margaret.

Charmaine is, in many ways, the driver of this plot, rather than Margaret. She’s the character who most reminds me of Northanger Abbey, for she’s the worldly-wise and flirtatious Isabella to Margaret’s innocent Catherine Morland, not exactly leading Margaret astray but using her as a go-between as Charmaine tries to provoke Dashiell into uncharacteristic jealousy, or at least some sign of passion, and manipulates everyone around her to do her bidding. Even though we can see that she doesn’t much care about Dashiell and is a thoroughly cold and selfish person, she still has flashes of humour and even friendliness. It would have been so easy to make her an out and out villain, but she’s far more layered than that. Her desire for Dashiell to court her properly is actually fairly understandable, although her assumption that he should simply ‘know’ what she wants is perhaps a little unrealistic.

I mentioned the echoes of Heyer’s Bath Tangle and Cotillion, which lies not so much in the characters involved but in the situation. The misaligned but betrothed couple, Charmaine and Dashiell, are reminiscent of Bath Tangle, while between Charmaine and Dashiell, his lovelorn friend Haworth and Margaret, Alwyn and Mrs Waite, we have three of the four couples for our cotillion. The fourth couple is Sir Dodkins Hargate, who takes a shine to Margaret because she reminds him of his dead daughter, and his old friend and neighbour, Mrs Turner. How these four align and realign themselves, and the right couples end up together is the subject of the second half of the book, and I won’t spoil it by elaborating on that. I did find it just a tad surprising, and I’d be interested to know just what Dashiell will do for money now, because it really wasn’t explained.

Nevertheless, this was another fine five star read for me, and even the Americanisms [*] didn’t bother me so much in this book (only the use of ‘passed’ instead of died or even passed on or passed away, but it’s a minor point in the overall scheme of things). The Regency Dudley evokes seems very authentic to me and I thoroughly enjoyed the Bath setting as a variation from the rural countryside (although I confess I wondered whether Sydney Gardens would really be holding outdoor breakfasts in the winter). This probably could be read as a standalone, but it would be far better after reading the series in sequence, to get the full picture of the Hapgood family background. And now on to Edith’s tale (and the faithful Lionel, I hope).

[*] The author tells me she’s fixed these.

Review: School For Love by Christina Dudley (2020)

Sometimes I wish Goodreads had more than five stars in its arsenal for books like this. I give a book five stars if it totally entertains me, even if it may have flaws, but there are books that rise above that level and this is definitely one of them.

Here’s the premise: the series is based around the Hapgood family of Bramleigh, the happy-go-lucky dog-mad squire, his permanently invalidish wife, and his four daughters. With one daughter safely (if eccentrically) married off in book 1 of the series, in book 2, the squire’s cousin, Hugh Hapgood, newly widowed and with three children to raise, arrived with the dutiful but sensible plan of marrying the oldest and rather beautiful daughter. She resolved that issue in spectacular style by eloping with a rakish but very charming young man, and with the two youngest daughters too young to marry, Hugh must think again. Without a wife, what is he to do with the children? He finds a place with a local clergyman for his son, Lionel, but the two girls, Hetty and Rosie, are sent away to school.

That lasts no more than a few weeks before scarlet fever and the girls’ homesickness force a rethink. They’ll do anything to avoid being sent back to school, Lionel’s very happy where he is, thank you very much, and Hugh isn’t keen to go back to his former home and the interference of his sister-in-law. The answer is to find himself another candidate for a wife, but there are different opinions on how to manage that, and the children are just as involved as anyone else.

There is one obvious candidate – thirty-one year old Rosemary deWitt, daughter of a man formerly in business but now knighted and living the life of a respected country gentleman. Rosemary isn’t a great beauty but she has a respectable portion and she’s had one or two offers. Not enticing enough to accept, however, and she doesn’t want to marry a man who’s only interested in her fortune. She contents herself with parish work and teaching a few local girls at a time the rudiments of reading and writing. It’s frustrating, though, when they learn a little and then drift away.

But children aren’t deterred by lack of beauty or interested in fortune, so Hugh Hapgood’s children take an immediate shine to her and decide that she’ll do very well as a new mama. And so they begin their plotting…

The children’s machinations are a big part of the plot, so if you don’t enjoy the scheming children trope, this is probably not the book for you. I suppose they’re a little mature for their years, but it wasn’t a problem for me and their devious little schemes were very funny (especially Lionel’s attempt to engineer a compromising situation so that his father would be obliged to marry Rosemary deWitt). But really, their schemes are hardly necessary, when the two principals are well on the way to matrimony already, without any help from anybody. Rosemary discovers the funny and charming man that thirteen years of unhappy marriage had all but suffocated, and Hugh has long since learnt to value qualities beyond appearance. They both discover that being in your thirties is no protection against the inner turmoil of falling in love.

And then disaster happens, which had me (literally) in tears. Even though I knew that of course these two were going to get their happy ending and I even suspected how it would happen, still the grief of the two lovers tore me apart. I punched the air with glee when Hugh had his mad moment and decided that… well, you’ll see. I won’t spoil the ending.

Here’s what I loved about this book: firstly, the characters. Not just the two leads, although Hugh, so serious and stern-faced initially and so passionate at the end, was especially delightful. Rosemary, the dutiful spinster who seems so past the age of matrimony but still has a wilful heart, was also easy to love. Then there were the children: Hugh’s three, Lionel, Hetty and Rosie, and also the Bramleigh girls, Margaret and Edith, who were all delightful.

But really, it’s all of them. This is an ensemble cast, set deep in the English countryside, far away from the usual Regency haunts of London, Hyde Park, Almack’s and so on. This is a setting and a group of people who might have existed any time from the middle ages onwards. The gentry, like the Hapgoods, the deWitts, the Porterworths and the Birdlows. The clergy, like Mr and Miss Benfield. And the shadowy, but still vibrant, characters of the servants. Every one of them feels alive and active and very, very real.

There are no actual villains in this all-too-believable world, but equally there are no saints either, just ordinary people doing what they can to get by and acting in whatever manner seems fit to them, pursuing their own ends without treading too much on other people’s toes. And sometimes that works and sometimes it just makes things worse, and they have to do whatever they can to fix things, or put up with the consequences. One review compared this with Middlemarch, both in the range of characters and the way that they are all likeable in their different ways, even when they’re self-absorbed or unobservant, and I can see that.

And, just as in real life, the characters ping off each other and cause actual changes. For instance, when Lionel first comes to the Benfields for tuition, he tells Rosemary that he doesn’t need to study or go to university because he’s going to be a country gentleman like the squire and spend his days doing sporty, outdoorsy things. But when he tells Rosemary that he plans to marry his cousin Edith, she asks him if he really thinks she would want to marry an uneducated man. And so gradually he changes his opinion. Such a small detail, but so true to life.

I’ve waxed lyrical about this book for a multitude of paragraphs, but was there anything I disliked about it? There was, but I have to say that it was not enough to knock a star off my rating. It was a repeated irritation, but everything else was so exceptional that I can let it go. I’m talking about the Americanisms[*]. I know there are a number of authors who deliberately choose to write with American style and spellings, and that’s fine. That’s a creative choice, and I would never quibble over an author’s right to do that. Besides, there are plenty of Regencies where there’s so much suspension of disbelief required that a few gottens and a chipmunk or two is neither here nor there. But when an author has created such a beautifully crafted Regency, where every element is utterly convincing, the use of gotten drops me instantly out of my immersion in the story. The two that tripped me up most were ‘write someone’ instead of ‘write to someone’, and the jarring overuse of ‘shall’. A phrase like ‘Lionel shall miss his sisters’ just sounds wrong to me, although I couldn’t even explain why. And these little tripwires, and a few others, are dotted throughout the book. [*] The author tells me these have been fixed.

But that is, for me, the only conceivable grumble about the book, and it’s a very minor one. Don’t let it put you off, because otherwise this book is as near to perfect as it’s possible to be. It could just about be read as a standalone, but why would you want to? Start with The Naturalist and then read the whole series. I’m going straight on to Margaret’s story, and then Edith’s. The chores can wait. Five hundred stars.

Review: A Very Plain Young Man by Christina Dudley (2014)

This was a delight almost from start to finish… no, not even almost, it actually was delightful from start to finish, because although the story opens with the hero visiting his mistress, which would normally be a downer in an otherwise traditional Regency, the scene is so funny I forgive it. The lady is a bit of a drama queen, and since Our Hero is not best pleased by her histrionics, he finds himself scratching around for a delicate way to end their relationship. To his every excuse, she finds some counter-argument, and in the end he’s forced to tell her that he’s about to marry. Any self-respecting mistress understands that he can’t have any other relationships – at least, not for a while. He’s free! But in order to keep the lady from pestering him, he’ll really have to find himself a wife, or at least make the attempt.

And so begins the story. Our Hero is Frederick Tierney, the wild older brother of Joseph, the gentle hero of the previous book, The Naturalist, and since said brother has just married the impoverished but equally beetle-mad Alice Hapgood, Frederick decides to descend on the Hapgoods. Having spied the serenely beautiful older sister, Elfrida Hapgood at a ball, he decides that she would make him a suitable wife. Since he’s handsome, charming and wealthy, not to mention the heir to a baronetcy, he can’t imagine that he’ll have any trouble wooing her. But Elfrida is a down-to-earth young lady, not at all romantic, and she knows Frederick’s quite above her touch, not to mention having a terrible reputation. To his surprise, she’s not even interested in him.

And that, in a nutshell, is the whole story. It doesn’t sound like much, does it? It’s hardly an original plot. But the skill is all in the execution, or in this case the characters of the two principals. Frederick is sunnily undeterred by Elfrida’s indifference, and determines to ruffle her composure however he can. This manifests itself in the most glorious teasing banter, which manages to be witty and brain-addling and gloriously funny all at the same time. Many authors are claimed to be masters (or mistresses) of the art of writing witty banter, but nothing I have read before even comes close to this. It’s quite brilliant.

Elfrida’s composure stems at least in part from short-sightedness, so she sees the world in unrelieved fuzziness and doesn’t fuss over the details. And Frederick, lovely Frederick, discovers her secret and realises that she’s never seen just how handsome he is, so he takes care to position himself close enough for her to appreciate him in all his golden-haired glory. And the beauty of this is that it doesn’t come across as arrogance, but as a simple acceptance of himself. He truly thinks that when she sees him properly, she’ll fall for him. And who would not? I defy anyone not to love Frederick.

Of course, there are bound to be obstacles to the path of true love. Frederick’s past comes back to haunt him, and Elfrida is faced with a potential husband of a very different kind, soberly honourable and a very sensible choice. Needless to say, things come right in the end, thanks to Frederick’s irrepressible conviction that Elfrida will marry him eventually. There is only one wobbly moment where Elfrida makes a really stupid decision, but the rest of the book is so brilliant, and Frederick’s solution to the difficulty is so adept that I won’t hold it against her.

An honourable mention for some of the minor characters. I loved Elfrida’s younger sisters, chatterbox Margaret and artistic Edith, and her parents too, the father only interested in his dogs, and the mother dozing by the fire, when she can work up the energy to get out of bed. I’ve mentioned the melodramatic mistress, and then there’s the ‘maid’, Mrs Todd, who is in a league of her own. I love a book that’s funny, and this one actually had me laughing till I cried.

The writing is a treat for anyone looking for truly Austenesque prose, although there are a fair few Americanisms [*]. Nothing drastic, though, and certainly not enough to disrupt my enjoyment. A wonderful read that I raced through almost in one sitting. Five stars.

[*] The author tells me that these have been fixed.