An odd little book, a bit lacking in the romance department and with far too many not particularly interesting characters milling about at the side of the stage, but very readable.
Here’s the premise: Kate Montgomery is settling back into domestic country life after several far more exciting years travelling with her widowed aunt. Her younger sister is about to make her debut in London, but Kate’s past the age of looking for a husband. But one day she receives an astonishing five proposals, one after the other. I’m going to take issue with this right from the start. Usually I can grant a book its opening premise, but not here. The idea is that this is an amusing prank organised by her dippy brother amongst her friends, but frankly, a proposal of marriage in the Regency wasn’t something to be taken lightly. If Kate had said yes to one of them, he would have been honour bound to marry her. Saying it was just a joke won’t cut it. So that’s a pretty silly start.
From then onwards, the story branches out into a multitude of side stories, some of which work better than others, but frankly the book would have been much stronger if it had dispensed with most of those and shed more of a spotlight on the two principals, Kate and her haughty aristocratic neighbour, the Earl of Winterton. He’s a starchy sort of man, although arrogant seems like a better word for it, but with Kate, he’s downright rude. But that’s alright, because she’s rude right back at him.
There’s an interesting reason for the antagonism. Some years ago, Winterton’s brother Carl wanted to marry Kate but she turned him down. He went off to fight in the war, but when he died he left her a substantial legacy (twenty thousand pounds, a tidy sum). Winterton disapproved of Kate accepting it. So did a number of other people, since it really wasn’t done to leave a fortune to a woman who wasn’t a relation of any sort, but Winterton took his disapproval to extremes. So now they snipe at each other constantly, and even though the reader knows that these two are going to get together, it’s hard to see how. It’s well past the 50% point before he notices how pretty she is.
The author rather cleverly chips away at his haughtiness by putting him in humiliating situations, and as they’re repeatedly thrown together they do begin to develop some respect for each other. When they all transfer to town for the season, he actually starts rather tentatively to court Kate, before one of the pesky side plots drags her away. And then it’s just a downhill run to the declarations of love.
I said the book is lacking, romantically, and frankly it’s so limply unemotional that it never actually builds up a head of steam. I make due allowances for its age (1979!) but even for a traditional read it’s pretty tepid stuff. I also disliked the amount of banal dialogue the author saw fit to inflict on the reader. We really don’t need all the greetings and how-are-yous and how was your journey and a recap of all the recent plot developments. It’s tedious.
This sounds pretty critical, but actually it rolled along pretty well, and I was absorbed in it from start to finish. It’s a little too bland for five stars, but it’s a good four stars for me.
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