Not my usual fare, this is a mid-Victorian romance with a complicated false identity that actually worked surprisingly well. No great depth to it, but an enjoyable read.
Here’s the premise: Eliza Southwell is an aspiring actress who’s had no luck in her native Boston finding stage work, so she takes a job as companion and maid to a wealthy widow travelling to England. Surely she’ll find work there? All she has to do is see her new mistress safely to her late husband’s estate – how hard can it be? But when the widow dies unexpectedly while at sea, and the crew mistakenly assume Eliza is the rich widow… what’s a girl to do? And when she sees Fernwood and meets her supposed sister-in-law, she’s not sure she ever wants to leave.
There just one small fly in the ointment – her supposed dead husband isn’t dead at all, and when he turns up alive and well and clearly able to identify his supposed wife as an impostor, the fat is well and truly in the fire.
This is a short book and a romance, so nothing happens that the reader can’t easily predict. The husband agrees to go along with the subterfuge, the two gradually fall in love and a way is found to set everything on a proper legal footing without creating a huge scandal. The villain isn’t really much of a villain, and is easily dealt with, so there isn’t much of an obstacle to the happy ever after.
This kind of premise only works if it’s believable, and in this case, both the wife’s demise and the actress who takes her place, and the husband being mistakenly thought to be dead are completely credible. The other difficult point is when the husband finds out his wife is strangely different from how he remembered her, and this is perhaps less believable, but by this point I was invested in both the principals, so I could go with the flow.
I have some minor grumbles. Firstly, the use of ‘passed’ instead of ‘died’, which was a huge irritant in the early chapters. I told myself repeatedly that Eliza was American, so maybe she would say that, but it still grated. The other major irritant was the use of dual first person narrative, which made it difficult to know whose was the point of view. I know it’s trendy now, but it’s really hard to read, so please, authors, don’t do this. These points were especially irritating as the book was otherwise very well written.
Other than that, I had no quibble with the story. I would have liked it to be a bit longer to give the characters somewhat more nuanced behaviours. As it was, the principals were all too good to be true, but it’s not a big deal. An enjoyable read. Four stars.
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