Dear Caliban

by Jane Donnelly

Abbie had never really minded being just "Leo Lansing's daughter." Leo was a famous actor, and she believed no one would ever find her interesting for herself alone.

Then she met the famous writer, Max Routledge, and his open dislike of the kind of person he thought she was upset her.

In her efforts to change Max's impression, Abbie grew into a totally new woman - one with strength to make a stand against her father for the man she loved!

Genres: Harlequin Romance

188 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Jane Donnelly began earning her living as a writer as a teenage reporter. When she married the editor of the newspaper she freelanced for women's mags for a while. After she was widowed she and her 5 year old daughter moved to Lancashire. She turned to writing fiction to make a living while still caring for her daughter, she sold her first Mills & Boon romance novel as a hard-up singleparent in 1965. She wrote over 60 romance novels for Mills & Boon until 2000. Now she lives in a roses-round-the door cottage near Stratford-upon-Avon, with four dogs and assorted rescued animals. Besides writing she enjoys travelling, swimming, walking and the company of friends.

Reviews

[Grrrrace · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another sweet-and-sad tale from Jane Donnelly with some familiar from her other books:

-The heroine is the sheltered and repressed but loving daughter of a famous and selfish actor (shades of The Silver Cage).
-The hero is one of Donnelly's rough and ready world-famous authors who is a babe magnet.
- The fall in love quickly, but the heroine's lack of self-esteem and sense of duty to her father come between them.
-The heroine's father is one of Donnelly's typically crappy parents who cares more about his own comfort than he does his daughter's happiness.
-The hero and heroine spend time together at a patented Jane Donnelly primitive cabin, where the heroine reveals herself to be spunky and sweet and easy to live with and very much in love with the hero, and he gets over his initial misconceptions and falls in love with her.
-The "I love yous" come well before the end of the book but there are a few chapters to get to the HEA.

Heroine Abigail (Abbie to herself) is the pampered but very lonely daughter of famous actor "King" Leo Lansing. She idolizes her very selfish father and spends her days in apparent idleness and luxury, wearing the beautiful clothes and jewels he buys for her to enhance his image and make the most of her looks since, as he tells her, she'll never be beautiful. She acts as his hostess for his many parties and answers all his fan mail. Unbeknownst to her father, she is also the unpaid skivvy of the household, cooking and cleaning to cover for the elderly housekeeper who raised her since her mother died when she was a young girl, and whom her father wouldn't hesitate to fire if he knew that Maudie could no longer keep up with the work.

She works part time writing inoffensive fluff pieces on her father's famous guests for a local paper. The editor asks her to interview a famous writer, Max Routledge (the hero), who is anchored in the harbor off the Cornwall village where Abbie lives. She goes down to the docks to wait for him and tries to ask him a few questions, but he is hostile and very rude to her. She asks her father to invite him to a dinner party, hoping to have another chance, but he is again mocking and dismissive of her and she thinks she hates him. She has a boyfriend and she thinks the boyfriend is falling in love with her, and more than anything, our love-starved heroine wants someone other than Maudie the housekeeper and Ben the gardener to show her affection--she has had other boyfriends but they all seem to dump her abruptly her after an initial short period of interest. She is used to being self-effacing and acting the role of perfect, glossy princess that has been assigned to her, but she is very lonely and lacking in self esteem. No one knows the real Abbie--the simple, kind, easy-going girl she really is, other than Maudie and Ben, and no one seems to really want to know her.

She's active and athletic, not the fainting flower everyone thinks she is. She likes to swim out to a rock a couple of miles out from her shoreline home, and one day falls asleep there and wakes up to find that a storm has stranded her. The hero rows out to her aid, and she goes back to his sailboat for a hot drink and to warm up. He clearly dislikes her and when she asks what he has against her, he pretty much says he knows her type: spoilt, idle, useless, a complete nothing without her father's name. She is upset and angry and calls him a bully and a boor, and then dives over the side of the boat and swims back home (he follows her in the dinghy to make sure she reaches shore).

Matters get worse when she overhears her boyfriend saying that she is a "frigid fish" and he's only seeing her because being seen with Leo Lansing daughter can do good things for his career. She is hurt but not heartbroken and let's him off the hook pretty easily, not letting him know she overheard him but resolved to stop seeing him. He doesn't mean much to her anyway, but she is really tired of people misjudging her and talking behind her back--the hero, although he was unforgivably rude, was at least honest and said it to her face. She thinks that if she can make him eat his words about her, she can recover some of her sense of self worth and maybe prove to herself as well as him that Abbie is worthwhile and very different from the pampered Abigail that has become her persona.

She asks Max if she can crew for him for a couple of days, and he initially scoffs at the idea but changes his mind and takes her onboard. She wants a change of scene, she tells him, and she is pretty sure he won't get handsy--it's a two cabin boat, he's been a guest of her father's, and he clearly detests her, as she does him, she tells herself. Oh honey.

She acts as steward, keeping out of his way as he sails up the coast (she thinks) and figuring out meals. After a couple of hours, she goes up top, surprised to find that they are no longer along the Cornish coastline, but are landing on a deserted island out to sea. The book takes a classic Harley twist: he has kidnapped her, more or less, and they will be staying on his newly acquired private island for a couple of weeks. He's a writer, and he's curious to see how such a pampered, helpless spoilt brat copes with living in primitive conditions with none of the creature comforts and care he thinks she is used to. It's punishment as much as anything. Or so he thinks.

But she is NOT "Abigail"; the real Abbie is naturally pretty and cheerful, funny and kind and helpful. She helps him with the cottage renovations and is a great companion, quiet at the right times, fun, and really easy to be around. She's open-hearted and very candid about herself, and lets slip a lot of details--the secret housework to protect her beloved Maudie; how her boyfriends seem to mysteriously slip away. Max is perturbed by what she tells him and it's pretty apparent he has a very clear picture of her selfish father, which makes the heroine, who really adores her father, defensive.

The heroine is soon head over heels for him, and pretty transparent about it. As he gets to know the real her, he falls pretty hard too--it usually doesn't take long for the heroes and heroines in Donnelly's books to say the "I love yous," but there are obstacles to be surmounted. He cuts their trip short and she is upset but he tells her he's bringing her back because once he "takes" her, he's not letting her go and he wants to give her time to make sure she really wants him. He wants to marry her but he says they'll wait a week and if she still feels the same, she can set the date. She wants to marry him within the month, but agrees to wait the week. He tells her he loves her and she very much loves and wants him, but he keeps his hands to himself, taking it slow and knowing that he has a fight on his hands, with her father as his rival.

They return home, and the housekeeper Maudie is thrilled--she liked Max from the beginning because she knows King Leo is determined not to let his adoring daughter go to anyone, and Max is up to the challenge. King Leo pulls out all the stops--he tries to make Abbie believe Max is all wrong for her (and tries to scare Max off as well), but Abbie resists, so Leo fakes a heart ailment on set in France, and the hero takes Abbie to see him. Max had already been to see her father to tell him they are getting married, and Leo tried to scare him off by saying how expensive and spoilt Abbie is, which Max knows now not to be true. But Abbie has a serious blind spot when it comes to her father--she thinks he's been the best father who has given her so much. When Max harshly tells her that, on the contrary, her father has "reduced and jeopardized" her; "damaged and almost destroyed" her, she is shocked and revolted and he backs off, knowing it's too much too soon.

There's a distance between them, and Maudie gives her a talking to, telling her that her father is selfish and will do anything to keep her as his loving slave and prevent her from marrying Max. Abbie refuses to believe her too--she's spent her entire life idolizing her father and being grateful to him.

She goes to see her father in France. Max goes with her but agrees to let her talk to Leo alone. Leo lists all the reasons why Max is not right for her--he's a womanizer (Abbie knows he isn't) and too tough for her (Abbie tells Leo she's pretty tough too). She's holding her own, but then Leo fakes a mini-attack and she is concerned and let's herself be persuaded to wait six months before marrying Max.

She tells Max, and he's not surprised. She asks if he'll wait for her six months, and he says yes, but he makes it pretty clear that he doesn't think that she, Miranda to her father's Prospero, is going to break free and escape with Max, playing the role of Caliban--the real owner of the island who dared covet the enchanter's daughter. She asks if he would die without her, and he says no, and she says that her father might well and surely six months isn't too much to ask. He agrees and kisses her somewhat angrily, and the magic is still there between them and poor Abbie is torn between her guilt and love for her father and her longing to start a life with Max, her true love.

She makes the mistake of telling her father about the new book Max is writing, and he leaks it to the press. Max is not happy and leaves for England to work on the book. Abbie realizes that her father did it deliberately to drive a wedge between them. It's the first crack in her refusal to see her father as the selfish man he clearly is, and she starts to wonder if Max and Maudie might be right when they told her that Leo was behind the quick endings of all her short-lived prior relationships. She starts to realize that her idol has feet of clay. She is also missing Max and fearful when she doesn't hear from him and can't get in touch with him. She tells her father she's going to go home to supervise some renovations that are being done, and he's willing to let her do that (because she'll still be at hand and it's to his benefit), so he tells her fine--and to pension off Maudie while she's there (Max had told him that Abbie had been doing all of the work at the house when Leo tried to say she was too idle and unable to cope for the likes of Max). She realizes that everything she didn't want to believe about her father is true. She disillusioned about him and about Max a bit--the man who loves her enough to marry her but not enough to give himself unreservedly, she thinks. She wonders if she'll be "seeking and following" all her life if she marries him.

She goes back home. She hasn't heard from Max and she asks Maudie if she's seen him and is told he's waiting for her in the drawing room. She goes in and all the distance drops away as she sees him, and she runs into his arms. He tells her he had fooled himself into thinking he could let her walk away, but he can't--he loves her, in it for the long haul. She has a very clear view of her father now but can be tolerant--they joke about him a little bit and it's clear she is ready to move on with her life, with Max as her husband. The decide to go back to the island where they fell in love. He tells her Maudie will be marrying Ben the gardener, so that's that loose end taken care of. And they go to tell Maudie that they, Abbie and Max, will be marrying in the next few days. And will be sailing off on the next tide. HEA. The End.

This is a really good example of what makes Donnelly's books such a pleasure to read--the emotional angst, our sympathy for the sweet but martyred heroine who finally makes a break for it, the beautiful and restrained writing style. An emotional read with a believable HEA that I enjoyed very much.

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of Jane Donnelly's best stories. Unique story and clear writing - I haven't seen duplicated by current crop of writers (sorry, Lynne Graham and Michelle Reid). Hero mistakenly thought heroine was a spoilt, lazy child of a famous actor and instead of ranting or bemoaning how unfair life is, she showed her mettle in a gentle but strong, calm way. Very effective use of location to show her spirit. Loved the way she collected pebbles to remember each day she spent with him in their remote island -- instead of the expensive jewelry that her father showered her with after her failed love affairs. And I love the hero for showing that he too was vulnerable in love. The ending scene when she thought she was coming home to an empty home is perfect way to end this beautiful story.

[Feeling-bookish · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well-done characters, a compelling story that kept me hooked. The father-daughter dynamic was well explored, and I liked both the hero and heroine. I wish they had more sweet moments together; the time they spent arguing, clearing misunderstandings or proving things to each other was far more than the time they spent being happy with each other.

[Last Chance Saloon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rather lovely tale with a nice hero and heroine. There's not much angst, nothing much happens, but they are likeable and it's very readable.

[Debby]

She’s the perfect martyr. DNF.

[Lori Nemitz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read between January & June 1983.

Original notes on book from 1983: Interesting. Set in England (common setting).

[Mellanie C]

I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/14522592