Review: The Duke’s Wayward Wallflower by Maggie Dallen (2022)

This is an oddity. A stern and grumpy duke, a shy country girl all at sea in London, and possibly the oddest romance I’ve read in a long time. I like a quirky story, but sometimes this felt a little too out there even for me. And yet, there are some wonderful moments that will stay with me for a long time.

Here’s the premise: Felicity Bishop’s father has just died, and his financial affairs seem to be in something of a tangle. While the helpful family attorney, Mr Beasley, is sorting things out, Felicity is to go to London with her cousin, the very wealthy Earl of Shepley and his sister, Lady Marion. She’s surprised to see the infamous Duke of Mandrick at the funeral, but perhaps it’s because he has an unspoken understanding with Marion. Felicity is at odds with him almost at once. His forbidding countenance reduces her to inarticulate terror, so inevitably he’ll despise her, she’s sure.

Off we go to London, where Felicity is rigged out in the finest of gowns, although in subdued colours because of her mourning, and meets Aunt Greta, who fulfils the eccentric aunt role to perfection. And of course the terrifying duke is hovering around, and having dinner with the family once a week, and reducing Felicity to jelly. When the earl and Marion are invited to the wedding of a friend, Felicity is left to the tender mercies of Aunt Greta and the duke.

Aunt Greta undertakes to instruct Felicity in the not very delicate art of enticing a man to fall in love with her, and this is definitely a highlight of the book. Felicity takes this advice to heart, with predictably disastrous results, fainting in the duke’s arms in the middle of a ball. What she doesn’t realise is that Aunt Greta’s advice is actually working – and not just on the grumpy duke, but on Felicity, too. There are pages and pages of the pair of them suffering with wayward pings and pangs of heart and stomach and limbs and who knows what (lips, mainly; there’s a fixation on lips), and although some of this is very funny, it felt a bit excessive at times. I prefer the palpitations of true love to be a little less overblown.

As a result of this dramatic swooning, the duke sweeps Felicity and Aunt Greta off to his own house so that he can keep an eye on them, and this leads to quite the loveliest scene in the book, in the music room. For once, he sets aside his veneer of dutiful rigidity and she loses her tongue-tied shyness. It’s probably the first time the two of them have been completely natural with each other, and it’s a delight. I’d have liked a lot more of this and less of the pinging and panging.

From here on, it’s all a question of how the duke will escape his understanding with Marion so he can marry Felicity, and I won’t go into details on that. There is some business with the oily Mr Beasley, too, which the duke sorts out handily. The ending irritated me somewhat, because poor Felicity is left in the dark longer than she should be and that’s an unforgivable sin to me.

This is not the book to read if you’re a stickler for historical accuracy. Felicity shouldn’t have been at her father’s burial (ladies just didn’t). Stays weren’t tightly laced in the Regency, since the waistline was so unimportant. The stays were only there to give a smooth columnar silhouette and to push up the bosom. The duke seems to know no other dance but the waltz, which was very rare then and still scandalous for a young unmarried woman, unless approved by the patronesses of Almack’s. And what on earth was Felicity doing even attending balls, let alone dancing, while still in mourning for her father? And finally (you’ll be relieved to hear), the oily Mr Beasley would have been an attorney, not a solicitor (who operated in the Court of Chancery, and didn’t sully his hands with mundane matters of estate business).

There are a fair few Americanisms, too, but if you can set all that aside and read the book as light-hearted entertainment only loosely connected to the Regency, it’s actually a lot of fun. There were a few too many pings and pangs for my taste, which keeps it to four stars, but I recommend it to anyone looking for something a bit different.