This is a difficult one for me to rate. On the one hand, there’s nothing major wrong with it, really. It just never set me alight… no, worse than that, it never even became interesting. Dull characters, predictable plot, and writing that, while competent, never sparkled.

Here’s the premise: Leonora Appleby is twenty-seven and settling into spinsterhood. She’s about to be forced out of her childhood home since the new heir will soon be arriving to claim it. Meanwhile, on a neighbouring estate, the mysterious Earl Rokeby has returned, injured after the war, a younger brother inheriting after his brother died in battle. And for Leonora’s best friend, Charlotte Blythe, abandoned at birth on the vicar’s doorstep, there’s a change which leads both girls, and former nanny Mrs Priddy, to London for the season.

I don’t know why it is that so many authors, when they decide to dive into Regency England, are so obsessed with the London season. There are so many other interesting settings to choose from, and frankly, the tired old trope of the country ingenues adjusting to the different society of London was done to death decades ago, and to sparkling effect by Georgette Heyer herself. It’s disappointing to find so little originality in an author who is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

At least she has done her research, and a great deal of it if the repeated descriptions of clothes, furniture and architecture is anything to go by. It certainly adds colour, and if I could have done with a trifle less colour, that’s just me. There’s less excuse for the title errors. One character is referred to as both Lady Livia Dearlove and the Honourable Miss Dearlove. She can only be one or the other, not both. And the curate is referred to as ‘Curate Fopling’ throughout. Clergymen were only ever addressed as Mr Fopling (or Dr, if he was a Doctor of Divinity, like Dr Grant in Mansfield Park).

But what about the characters? The plot? The romance? Well… this is where it gets tricky. There are certain expectations for a Regency romance: it must have either a rattling plot, or appealing characterisation, or emotional depth, or scintillating dialogue. I’d like wit as well, but that may be asking a bit much. Obviously, the more of them the better, but it must have at least one of these facets to engage the reader. This book? Not so much. The plot, far from rattling, was a pedestrian affair without a single surprising feature. The characters, particularly the two females, start off well. Leonora, in particular, being older, is both sensible and intelligent, but towards the end the need for some bumps in the road to the inevitable happy ending sees her descending into stupidity. Charlotte’s silliness is more excusable given her age, but really, people, how hard is it to just tell people what’s going on and not try to do it all yourself? The two leading men were very likeable and suitably heroic, but a little bit of self-awareness of their own feelings wouldn’t have gone amiss. The villains were straight from central casting, a pair of standard-issue antagonists.

What about emotional depth? This is what I think of as the Mary Balogh effect – she may be wobbly on historical accuracy, and her characters behave in some wildly peculiar ways, but she makes me cry every single time. This author, not so much. For one thing, time after time she tells us what the characters are thinking and feeling, instead of showing us. And then she headhops with gay abandon, jumping from one character’s point of view to another even within the same paragraph. All of that serves to distance the reader from the characters, so when we really should be feeling their pain or fear or anger, we never do. And the big reveals are just tossed out there, without any emotional resonance at all. Not that they were surprising or anything, but still.

As for scintillating dialogue, I cut the author some slack here, because it’s a hard thing to do, and genuine wit is as rare as hen’s teeth. I don’t think I laughed once while reading this. Even so, there were some very intense exchanges between Leonora and Lord Rokeby (and sometimes in some bizarre places – a ballroom, for instance, or a carriage with the chaperon ‘pretending’ to sleep). I should perhaps mention that Mrs Priddy must be the world’s worst chaperon. She sat with her knitting at the ball, leaving her charges unattended, and at the end, Leonora and Rokeby are stripping off and getting hot and heavy while she (again) ‘pretends’ to sleep! Ridiculous.

This seems like a long catalogue of complaints, and it is, I suppose, but it’s more from disappointment than anything else. There are plenty of Regencies that I can get through despite a multitude of errors because I don’t expect much from them, but Jane Dunn is a different case (a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, for heaven’s sake!). So it ought to be literature, right? And perhaps at some level that I don’t fully appreciate, it is. Maybe I’m so attuned to the entertainment end of the genre that I can’t see a good book when it’s in front of me. But my personal requirement is to be entertained. If the author can’t tell a good story which draws me in and immerses me in the lives of these people, then I’m going to mark it down. I’d have given it two stars except that there’s some lovely writing in the descriptions of settings and clothes, so I’m going to be generous and go for three stars.