Review: Highcliffe House by Megan Walker (2024)

I’m not at all sure what to make of this one. It’s well written, although I strongly dislike the dual first person perspectives, but none of it really convinces me and it doesn’t quite feel Regency to me, although I can’t quite say why. Just something out of kilter.

Here’s the premise: Anna Lane detests her wealthy father’s business partner, Graham Everett. He’s always taking her father away from her, sometimes just by distracting him with business affairs and sometimes physically, leaving her alone, since her mother is dead. After she mistakenly entangles herself with the wrong man, all she wants is time alone with her father to recover, but Graham is once again there to distract him. And this time, her father sends her off with Graham to check out his latest investment while he pursues an interest elsewhere.

The new investment is in Brighton, where Graham lives, and Anna is required to live with his family in their rather shabby house. At first, she dislikes the situation intensely, but the family slowly grow on her, and the view from her window is incomparable. Despite her determination to tell her father not to invest, Anna can’t help being charmed by Brighton – the pebbly beach, the Steine, the library and the Pavilion gardens, not the mention the sea air and the vibrancy of the coast.

She’s also charmed by Graham, and here’s one area where the plausibility wobbles somewhat. In only a week, Anna goes from outright hostility to head over heels in love, and frankly, that doesn’t convince me for a moment. His feelings have been established much earlier so there’s not so much of a leap to love, but hers shift from one extreme to the other.

I confess that I don’t really get Anna. She seems too volatile to me, too willing to be hurtful just for the sake of it, and not even pretending to a surface politeness with Graham. She blames him for her father’s absences, even though her father is his own man and able to make his own decisions about how he spends his time. I found it a little odd that he needed to travel so much because of his investments, since rich men usually just handed over the money and left managers and attorneys and bankers deal with the sordid details. But apparently he travelled so much that he couldn’t even spare the two weeks a year he usually spent with Anna at Lyme.

I notice a trend in modern Regencies away from the traditional means of winning or losing a fortune (gambling, usually) towards the uncertainties of ‘investments’ (usually unspecified). Which is all very well, but authors need to be careful of having their Regency gentlemen too involved in actual work, which was a huge no-no. Yes to putting money into a venture, but no to having anything at all to do with running it. This book doesn’t do that, but all that travelling Mr Lane does comes very close. This book also steps outside the traditional boundaries by having Anna directly involved in an investment decision, another modern trend of heroines who are actively involved in more than embroidery and good works.

Here’s another oddity. Graham, we discover, comes from very humble, not to say scandalous stock, yet he’s become a trusted associate of a very wealthy and well-connected man like Mr Lane. How precisely did that work? I’m not sure that the book ever explains it satisfactorily. Graham is a little easier to understand than Anna. He’s the classical self-made man, hauling himself up by his bootstraps to a life where he and his family need never worry about money again. He talked about one more big investment which would see him succeed, but you have to wonder if he would ever truly be satisfied, or whether there would always be ‘one more investment’.

The star attraction of the book is Graham’s family, his gentle mother, his initially hostile but easily won over sister Ginny, and the delightfully outspoken and original Tabitha. And Anna, society girl that she is, manages to shed all her starchy upper-class ways and fit right in. There’s a charming moment when Graham emerges after a long evening working at his correspondence and accounts, to find Anna and the sisters practising the waltz and falling about laughing, as sisters do. It not only shows how well Anna has melted into the Everetts’ embrace, but also how alone Graham is, the only son trying hard to restore the family’s fortune’s in place of his feckless disappeared father. He seemed oddly serious and out of place at that moment.

There are quite a few moments like that scattered throughout the book where the author’s talent shines through despite things that seem odd elsewhere. Some scenes, like the outing to the pebble beach, start off by Anna and Graham being snippy with each other and end in pure fun. There there are the moments of vulnerability for both Graham (the cow) and Anna (Mr Lennox). The romance is finely drawn, despite the speed of it, and Brighton comes out of it very well.

Quibbles? I’ve mentioned my dislike of having dual points of view both in the first person (I went, I said…). I invariably get muddled as to whose perspective it is (but that’s just me; I do understand why authors and readers like that style). There were a few Americanisms and anachronisms. I had to smile at the idea of hunting elk! But one thing made me shudder: the repeated use of Ms Peale. Other characters were Miss or Mrs, so why was this one character referred to by the very modern term Ms?

Overall, this was probably not my kind of book. I’d say it was aimed at a less traditional audience, who won’t be upset by the anachronisms or the quirks of the Regency depicted here that make me uneasy. Nevertheless, I mostly enjoyed it, the romance was powerful, and I liked Graham’s family very much (especially Tabitha). So I’m going to go for four stars.