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.