After the slightly flat story of Edith and Lionel in A Purloined Portrait, this is an absolute cracker. Hetty in London is a delight. As is inevitable with any Regency novel set during the London season, there are well-worn paths to tread and over-used tropes to drive the plot, but Hetty and her swain are so gloriously different, and the background characters so fascinating, that it’s easy to overlook.
Here’s the premise: in the last book, Hetty’s machinations secured the engagement of her cousin and brother, but left another cousin, Caroline, without a betrothal. Caroline is to have a season in London, and when Hetty is invited to join her, she sees a way to repay Caroline for her previous bad turn and help her to find a husband. Caroline sets her sights on the season’s glittering prize, Mr St John Rotherwood, newly wealthy and formerly a tutor of Hetty’s brother Lionel at Oxford. Hetty has an instant advantage over every other young lady – she knows the prize already, so she determines to use her advantage to Caroline’s benefit. But Mr Rotherwood is a scientist and intellectual, and Caroline is (frankly) an air-head. Instead, it’s curious, avid reader Hetty who has most to say to Mr Rotherwood.
This doesn’t suit Caroline, but it also doesn’t suit Mr Rotherwood’s mother, Anne, who suffered for years as the outcast of the family for marrying beneath her, and is now determined to resume her place in society and see her son marry as befits his new position. You’d imagine she would be sympathetic to her son’s growing love for Hetty and want him to choose with his heart, as she did, but no. All the resentments of the years, and her pride in being a baronet’s daughter, combine to make her ambitious for her son. A duke’s daughter is perhaps beyond his grasp, but there’s the very beautiful, if vapid, Lady Sylvia, an earl’s daughter…
Poor Mr Rotherwood is caught in the middle of these machinations. He hates the emptiness of the social whirl, and would far rather get to know the intriguing Miss Hetty Hapgood, who at least has a brain in her head, but he also wants to make his mother proud of him. It’s a dilemma. And just at this point, a huge scandal erupts around Hetty, and Mr Rotherwood steps forward to save her from condemnation. And so we get into the very traditional trope of the enforced betrothal, which the two protagonists arrange between themselves rather ingeniously.
This might have been a predictable tale, but Dudley eschews the well-worn paths of innumerable other authors, and imbues her characters with creative minds and real emotions. Hetty, in particular, is a wonderful character, always brimming with original ways to solve problems, her own or other people’s, and I was thrilled to bits when she finally snatched her own happy ending from seeming defeat. Mr Rotherwood makes a terrific hero, too, and even his mother, who seemed to be an obstacle for most of the book, softened considerably in the end.
I am so sorry to reach the end of this glorious series, although happily the author is already writing a new series, with another delightfully quirky family to enjoy. Christina Dudley is one of my absolute favourite authors, without a single dud in her catalogue. This one is another five star read for me, but I commend every one of her books to anyone who wants an original, literate and downright charming Regency.
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