A much better read than the first book in the series (The First Snowdrop, to which I gave three stars – for a Mary Balogh book!). This one has a vastly improved hero, and two possible brides for him, both trying to do their best in difficult circumstances.

Here’s the premise: Jack Frazer has been invited to spend Christmas with his ducal grandparents, along with their vast family, a lot of organised events he’ll be required to participate in, and his future bride. At least, a young lady has been invited, and Jack will be expected to court her and, if they like each other, to propose. He’s not much minded for marriage, having enjoyed his freedom very much, thank you, but he finds himself obeying the summons and meeting the young lady, only to discover that, while she’s very pretty, she’s also very young, a petite, doll-like creature who looks as if she’s straight out of the schoolroom.

Meanwhile, the main entertainment of the festivities is to be provided by a renowned actress, Isabella, the Comtesse de Vacheron, who will perform several extracts from Shakespeare, with the aid of a supporting cast provided by the family. She’s a widow with two children, and remarkably respectable for an actress, having been feted in both France and Britain. There’s only one problem – she was Jack’s mistress for a year nine years ago, a relationship that ended in anger and bitterness. Neither is happy to find the other at the party, but they agree quite early on to leave the past where it belongs and avoid each other as much as possible.

The reader knows, of course, how well that’s going to work out. What makes this whole setup so interesting is that Jack’s potential bride, Juliana Beckford, is also given equal billing with the two principals, so we see her thoughts and feelings as well as Jack’s and Bella’s. I liked Juliana very much. Some reviewers called her spineless, but I think she’s a perfect Regency lady, well brought up, if very innocent and unversed in the ways of the world, and she puts her duty and obedience to her parents above her own wishes. They have arranged a very prestigious marriage for her to the grandson of a duke, a man of independent wealth, and even though she worries about him being so much older and more experienced than her, and she isn’t in love with him, she sets out to do what she feels is the right thing.

Jack, too, is determined to do the right thing. He accepts at an early stage that he’s going to offer for her, and sets himself to court her conscientiously, taking things slowly because he realises she’s very innocent. And if he has reservations about her youth and his lack of physical desire for her, he tells himself that will grow, and that he can make her happy. He’s being honourable and mature and not trying to recapture his youth with Bella, and that makes him a proper hero in my book.

Bella I’m less sure of. I’m not much enamoured of heroines who are so driven to succeed in their chosen profession that they essentially sabotage every other part of their lives. But I suppose she was young and naive and caught in a difficult situation when she was Jack’s mistress, and as a mother she can’t be faulted. She puts her children first, always, and I can only applaud that. The children, actually, are a real highlight of the book. They’re not merely ciphers or plot devices or there to be winsomely cute or wilfully awful. Things do get a bit schmaltzy towards the end, but Balogh keeps it just on the right side.

I do dislike the obvious double standard. One of the reasons Jack and Bella fell out was because he was convinced she was sleeping with other men, despite her denials. When he finally realises the truth, there’s an air of: oh, that’s all right then, she’s not a slut after all. Whereas he consoled himself after their parting by sleeping with every woman he could get his hands on. But somehow nothing is ever said about that.

What else grated? The vast assortment of relations, and since most of them are happily paired off with young children, it’s difficult not to believe that there’s a whole series somewhere that told the stories of them all. As it was, the only ones I knew were the awful hero from The First Snowdrop and his wife, and I remembered Freddie (‘I’ve got no brains’) from that book, too, because really, could Balogh not have given him some variation? The whole acting thing was pretty tedious, and apart from the plot device of getting a famous actress to the house, there was no point to it. There was no moment of revelation when Jack and Bella acted together, and all the lurches forwards and back in their relationship happened for other reasons. I’m not a big fan of a Christmas setting with snowball fights and decorating the rooms and the inevitable kissing bough. And did they really have an evening church service in the Regency? And please, please, please can we banish the obligatory skating on the lake scene, followed by the mind-numbingly predictable falling through the ice scene. It’s been done. It’s old.

But despite my grumbles, I really loved this book – mostly! I can’t quite give it five stars, but Balogh did her usual trick of making me cry several times, so let’s call it a very good four stars. Warning: it’s Balogh so there are sex scenes.

One of the things I most admire about Mary Balogh is her ability to look unflinchingly at her characters and their behaviour. This is one of those cases where I rather wish she had flinched, and given the hero at least one or two redeeming features. This was her first published work, so perhaps one should make allowances, but it’s difficult. This is a fairly ranty review so it’s quite spoilerish. Don’t read unless you want to know most of the plot.

Here’s the premise: Six years ago, Richard, the Earl of Brampton, had met a passionate but regrettably anonymous stranger at a masked ball. She disappeared before the unmasking, and he was never able to find her again, although he’s never forgotten her. Now, with his mother agitating for him to marry and sire the essential heir, he settles on mousy Margaret Wells, who will give him no trouble, and can be safely left in the country raising the heir while he maintains his mistress in London. What he doesn’t know is that Margaret is the very same passionate stranger he remembers so vividly. He also doesn’t know that she fell instantly in love with him six years ago. So the scene is set for a gradual rediscovery of that passionate interlude.

Except that’s not what happens. Richard decides that he can’t inflict passion on his mousy wife, so sex is a brief, perfunctory affair, and she is too mouse-like to complain. And naturally, she can’t possibly tell him that she was the stranger from six years ago. Wait… why ever not? Well, because the plot requires her to keep quiet about it, that’s why. And so she does, but she’s a bit sad, because she enjoyed all that sexy kissing and fumbling under clothes from six years ago and she’d like a bit of that now, thank you very much. But when younger sister Charlotte arrives for her come out and asks why she’s a bit sad, Margaret tells her the whole story, and Charlotte has the brilliant idea that Meg should dress up in her mask costume again and see if she can entice Richard into a bit of that sexy stuff. And so she does, arranging to just happen to bump into him at Vauxhall’s, and would you believe it, he not only falls for his mysterious stranger all over again and gets hot and heavy with her, but he doesn’t even recognise his own wife?

Well, no, I wouldn’t believe it, actually. They even begin a torrid affair in his best mate’s bed, and even though he sees the similarities with his wife, he doesn’t once twig that it’s actually her. Yet the best mate, who doesn’t know her half as well, recognised her instantly. How ridiculous is that?
The other major stumbling block to credibility is Margaret herself. We’re supposed to believe that her public persona is very calm and reserved, almost cold in its lack of emotion. Nothing, it seems, dents her composure. But somehow, put her in a Marie Antoinette costume, a wig and a mask, and she becomes an unrestrained nymphomaniac. I would have found this more credible if we’d been shown any sign of this inner tempestuousness, but there’s nothing at all, not a flash of anger or a sharp word or the slightest hint of a flounce. She doesn’t even speak up for herself, simply accepting whatever neglect or implied insult her husband heaps on her head.

The question of Richard’s morality is more ambiguous. Nowadays, a hero who maintains his mistress after he’s married and then has an unrestrained affair with a woman whose name he doesn’t even know is a bit of a non-starter for a romantic novel, but when this book was written, almost forty years ago, heroes of this type were par for the course. And he does very gradually come to appreciate his wife. He dispenses with the mistress and he even gives up his affair with the mystery lady because he tells himself he’s in love with his wife.

Meanwhile there are a couple of side romances going on, for Charlotte and also for Richard’s brother Charles. This may be an opportune moment to point out that there a great many perfectly respectable names for Regency characters, so it would be nice if authors would refrain from using two such similar ones as Charles and Charlotte. Anyway, the side romances aren’t wonderful, but in the end they’re better than the main event, which blows up in spectacular fashion.

Richard, you see, discovers the Marie Antoinette costume in his wife’s wardrobe and the slow-top finally realises that she was the mystery lady all along. Whereupon he goes into a towering rage at being made to look a fool, because it’s all about him, you see. He was the one who chose to have a torrid affair with a woman he believed was not his wife, but it’s her fault for being a slut and enticing him (or something). She tries to explain but he doesn’t want to listen, and then he crosses an inviolable line, in my view, by using violence against the heroine, his own wife. Even when she tells him not to hurt her too badly because she’s pregnant, it doesn’t calm him down because he doesn’t believe her! Only when she finally blows her top and points out what a hypocrite he is does he realise that maybe she has a point. Then he cries, tells her he loves her and they go to bed and have passionate sex, and I can’t tell you how much I despise him at this point. I don’t have much respect for her, either, but he is far, far worse. I don’t think he even knows the meaning of the word love.

This was heading for three stars, because on the whole the thing is readable and even enjoyable for much of it, and even though I wanted to slap both hero and heroine upside the head, I make allowances for the age it was written in, and it was Balogh’s first book, after all. My own first Regency was pretty terrible, too. But that ending made me so mad, I knocked it down to two stars. So there. Recommended only for completists, and definitely not for anyone looking for a clean read – there’s an awful lot of sex in it. Or a lot of awful sex for Margaret, poor girl.

The theme of this book, the Regency marriage of convenience and what it would be like in reality without the romance author’s typical sprinkling of magical stardust, is one that interests me greatly. Balogh has tackled the idea in two other books (that I know of; there may be others). Dancing With Clara (1993) suffers a little from a depressing ending, in my opinion, but in The Obedient Bride (1989) she gets it absolutely right, and with a proper hero. I highly recommend it as an antidote to the insufferable Richard.

These early Baloghs are a bit of a mixed bag, but even at their worst, they show flashes of the author’s brilliance, and at their best, they’re superb. After a so-so last Balogh (The First Snowdrop), this one was definitely in the superb category, although as with all older books, the reviews are fairly mixed.

Here’s the premise: Jane Matthews is still unmarried at the age of twenty-three, but she’s having another season with her younger friend, Honor Jamieson. Jane is the quiet, rather plain, sensible one, while Honor is the beautiful bubblehead, revelling in her power over men, and flirting outrageously with any male who catches her eye. And the first man to do so is Michael, Viscount Fairfax, wildly handsome and now a widower with two small daughters, and in the market for a second wife. Honor determines she’ll have him, and his friend, Joseph Sedgeworth, a much plainer man, will do for Jane.

But then a strange thing happens, for Michael decides that Jane would do very well for his second, more practical, marriage and makes her a wildly unromantic proposal, which she rejects with extreme prejudice, giving him a piece of her mind for treating her like a commodity, not a person of worth in her own right. And the twist here is that she’s been in love with him ever since she first saw him five years earlier. And as if that weren’t enough, Jane finds herself falling into a comfortable friendship with the friend, Joseph, and when he proposes, she accepts him. Silly girl.

The Michael/Jane situation reminds me a bit of Georgette Heyer’s Sprig Muslin, where the heroine turns down the hero’s pragmatic offer because she’s been in love with him for years. Which never made the least bit of sense to me. If you love the guy, then for heaven’s sake marry him and wait for him to appreciate your true worth (as he inevitably will, if he’s a halfway decent sort of bloke). But Jane wants her true worth to be appreciated right now, thank you very much, and when Joseph does so, she settles for him instead of the man she loves. Who then promptly realises what he’s lost, and falls in love with her. Of course he does.

So the rest of the book is the familiar, not to say well-worn, engaged-to-the-wrong-person plot. The author’s method of extricating her characters from this tangle is ingenious, requiring the bubblehead to be sensible for once, although as it gets her what she wants, too, and she’s a very determined lady, it can also be viewed as a selfish move.

This book wasn’t subtle at all. When the scene shifts to the hero’s country home where the cute kids are waiting, inevitably they take to Jane at once and she to them, whereas the bubblehead hates kids with a passion and avoids them like the plague. Since the hero is besotted with them, any possibility of a match between them is out of the window. Meanwhile, hero and heroine are playing happy families, and bubblehead is amusing herself with the friend (who is engaged to the heroine, mark you, but bubblehead wouldn’t let a trivial detail like that stand in her way).

Since this is Mary Balogh, there has to be the obligatory sex scene, although it’s more of a quick fumble and a hasty adjusting of dress. It’s also completely unnecessary and (in my view) out of character for the people involved, but the author seems to feel the need for something graphic. It’s a pity, because otherwise this would please the traditionalists nicely. There are some minor anachronisms (dance cards and a modern style of waltz, but these are almost ubiquitous, sadly). Otherwise, this is an excellent examination of how marriage worked in Regency times, and how you choose a partner for life in the mad social whirl of the season, and the sort of mistakes that arise because of that. I very much enjoyed it. Five stars.

Well. A difficult book to review because there’s so much wrong with it, as a multitude of scathing reviews attest, and yet it had its moments, and the author managed to hit her trademark emotional highs. I can forgive a great deal when a book makes me tear up.

Here’s the premise: Alexander Stewart, Viscount Merrick, heir to a dukedom, is on his way to London to finalise his betrothal to Lady Lorraine, daughter of a marquess. He’s caught in a snowstorm and seeks shelter at the nearest habitation, a large house containing only one female servant, Anne Parish. He orders the servant about, and considers quite seriously whether to bed her, but only backs away when he realises she is innocent and that might result in a great deal of tedious squawking. He really is an arrogant, entitled jerk at this point.

The next morning, he discovers his error. She’s not a servant but the unassuming sister of the owner, who returns mid-morning with the vicar, finds Alex in residence and sets up an even more tedious squawking. His sister has been compromised, he says, and he expects Alex to marry her pronto, and so does the vicar. And Alex tamely does so, even putting some effort into being charming to Anne, so that she’s quite convinced that he’s fallen in love with her. Not so, for as soon as the wedding is over, he takes her to Redlands, a much-neglected minor property of his, and dumps her there. But not before telling her in the harshest terms that he thinks she’s trapped him into marriage. Oh, and also not before bedding her, and discovering the passionate woman within. Lovely guy.

Let’s just unpack some of that. First of all, there’s really no need for him to marry her at all. He’s the heir to a dukedom, after all, and she’s lower gentry, at best. Besides, he’s already committed to the lovely Lorraine, not officially betrothed but with a clear understanding. Further, nothing actually happened between Alex and Anne, and no one knows about it except the brother and the vicar, and are they really likely to tell the world? Hardly. So by far the most sensible answer is for Alex to simply apologise for mistaking her for a servant, but refuse to marry her. After all, he would have died if she hadn’t taken him in, and that would be slightly unreasonable, merely to preserve her reputation.

Secondly, what is Alex thinking of to propose with politeness and even charm, and then turn on Anne so viciously? Where are his gentlemanly manners? She’s his wife, for heaven’s sake, and even though she isn’t the wife he wanted or expected, what’s done is done, and he could at least be courteous to her. But no, he refuses to let her leave Redlands for any reason, taking up with a mistress in London and to all intents and purposes ignoring Anne altogether.

She has a bit more gumption, so after a weepy phase, she picks herself up, and gives herself, the house and the garden a makeover. I always disapprove of the ugly-duckling-to-swan routine, so beloved of romance books, as if a plain, dumpy girl can’t be loved for herself, but here we go again. She loses weight, and allows her maid to turn her into an elegantly fashionable lady. And lo and behold, she’s beautiful! Who’d a thunk it?

An aside here about the weight thing. The Regency, in fact the whole of history up until perhaps the 1920s, was an age of conspicuous consumption. If you had money, you flaunted it. Queen Elizabeth I wore jewels stitched onto her gowns. The Georgians wore gorgeous brocades and wigs too elaborate to do any actual work in. The Regency saw women in impractical pale muslins, and men in equally impractical white, starched cravats, to prove they had enough clothes to change frequently. The Victorians put their women in vast hooped skirts using yards and yards of material. And all of them saw nothing wrong with eating heartily. You’ve only got to look at the portraits of the era to see the nicely rounded arms and shoulders of the women. Only poor people were thin. But even in Balogh’s later series, she’s still putting out the idea that plump women are less than ideal.

Needless to say, Alex can’t avoid Anne altogether and eventually his ducal grandparents force them together by inviting them both to a house party, where Alex naturally fails to recognise his now beautiful, fashionable wife. Again, he blows hot and cold, ignoring her during the day and bedding her enthusiastically at night. But the duchess has a cunning scheme to force a reconciliation, by making all the young ones perform in a play and… No, let’s not talk about the play. It was all too tedious for words, with a cast of thousands of cousins, about whom the reader doesn’t give a fig. And of course, Alex and Anne inch towards an accommodation and even (surely not?) love.

Naturally, it’s not as simple as that, because Alex is *still* an arrogant, entitled so-and-so. Unbelievable. Here’s the thing, arrogant, entitled hero – if you want to make your wife happy, you have to start by finding out what that might be, not just by assuming you know what she wants. She soon sets him straight on that one, giving him both barrels and then some, and finally, at long last, a tiny drop of humility seeps into his arrogant, entitled head. And it gets kind of emotional, which is a thing that Mary Balogh does exceptionally well. Almost that final moment got my rating up to four stars. Almost.

But he’s just such a horrible hero, I can’t quite forgive him, so three stars it is.