Review: Isabelle by Sophia Holloway (2022)

This is such a beautifully written book that was completely wonderful for the first 75%, then became a little melodramatic, but in a good way, until the hero fell at the final hurdle. This is going to be spoilerish, so don’t read it if you don’t want to know.

Here’s the premise: Isabelle Wareham is nineteen, and while her much older sister had a season in London and made a good match, she stayed at home nursing her father through his final illnesses. Now he’s died, and Isabelle is put in the guardianship of her brother-in-law, Lord Dunsfold. Her cousin Sir Charles Wareham, the head of the family, is given joint charge of the estate which Isabelle is to inherit, but it is Cornelia’s husband who has charge of her person. Isabelle doesn’t much like him, but she will be of age in not much more than a year, so it is only a temporary arrangement and he seems minded to leave her at peace in her home during her period of mourning.

But then fate intervenes. A friend of Sir Charles, Lord Idsworth, staying with him for a shooting party, is accidentally shot, and carried to Isabelle’s home. She nurses him back to health with the inevitable result, but however predictable this might be, the gentle and charming way they fall in love is utterly beautiful. It reminded me a little of Heyer’s Venetia, where it is obvious that the two principals are like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that fit together perfectly.

However, Idsworth is not deemed a suitable match by Isabelle’s avaricious sister and brother-in-law, so she is whisked off to Bath to be kept in relative seclusion until she agrees to marry the suitor of their choice, Mr Semington, whose principal attraction is that he will pay the Dunsfolds handsomely for the privilege of relieving them of the care of Isabelle. She is blissfully certain that she has only to wait until she comes of age and she can marry the man of her heart, but it gradually dawns on her that her letters are being intercepted and she has no way to communicate with the outside world.

Needless to say, our hero arrives on the scene to save the day despite the machinations of the not very appealing Mr Semington and the very unappealing sister and her husband. The heroine herself is also able to take steps to rescue herself from her predicament. Things do get quite complex for a while, but eventually we come to the point where I fell out rather with the hero. This is rather spoilerish, so if you don’t want to know anything about it, skip forward to the last paragraph.

To my mind, a hero is one who will do pretty much anything to rescue the heroine from whatever dire circumstances the villains inflict on her, and I have no problem with Lord Idsworth in that regard. His pursuit of the heroine and subsequent rescue are suitably heroic. But what he does after that falls very much short of heroic behaviour. No matter what the villain has done, his retribution should come either from the law or should be proportionate and rational. It’s not for the hero to mete out summary justice, yet that is pretty much what Idsworth was prepared to do. Only the words of the heroine drew him back from actually killing the villain, and to me that is unacceptable behaviour. I get that he was in an absolute rage about it, but it really wasn’t a sensible reaction. Even when he drew back from actually killing the guy, he did something pretty nasty to him, as well. If he’d merely humiliated him, that would have been enough (and very funny, as it happens). But there was nothing remotely funny about his violence.

So although this was a beautifully written book in almost every way, that one moment reduces the rating to four stars for me. But I still recommend the read, and I fully intend to read everything that Sophia Holloway writes going forward.