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.

A lovely old-fashioned Regency with all that entails. Yes, it has some weaknesses, like an implausible premise, a hero with a penchant for mistresses and a romance that comes to the boil only in the last paragraph, but I thoroughly enjoyed it nevertheless.

Here’s the premise: Lord Ashe is in the market for a new mistress after setting his last ladybird loose, and there’s an opera singer who’s a bit different – she do nicely. But supper with the lady makes him realise that she’s more different than he had guessed – not only young and innocent, but also caring for two younger brothers. He decides not to press her, giving her the remains of the supper for the boys and taking her home, where the boys turn out to be surprisingly well brought up. Lord Ashe is intrigued and concerned by some of the information Lissa and the boys let slip, so when his widowed sister has trouble keeping a governess for her sickly son, Ashe proposes Lissa for the job. She’s suspicious that he’s just using that as an excuse to seduce her, but when another potential seducer circles close to her, she reluctantly accepts the offer.

From here on, there aren’t too many surprises. Lissa turns out to be an excellent governess, her two brothers make good playmates for Ashe’s nephew, Colin, and Ashe behaves impeccably. It’s an odd thing, but rakes in Regencies always do behave impeccably once the story gets under way, although Ashe does at least have believable moments of still hankering after Lissa. Colin turns out to have what sounds like asthma, but a bolt for the country and Ashe’s own estate restores him to health, and the three boys enjoy a healthy outdoorsy existence.

There’s bound to be a fly in the ointment, however, and here it’s Colin’s mother, a clothes-obsessed social butterfly and her noble suitor, who let the cat out of the bag regarding Lissa’s former occupation as an opera singer (regarded as no better than a prostitute). All sorts of ructions ensue, but in the midst of the mayhem, Ashe, having long resisted looking into Lissa’s mysterious past, now sets out to discover who precisely she is. More ructions ensue, and really, he should have known better. He knew perfectly well that they were escaping from a violent home, so it would have been much better to leave well alone. Or, since he was very much in love by this point, he could have gone to Lissa and said: ‘I want to marry you, but to keep you and the boys safe, I need to know just who you are.’

But of course everything comes right in the end, without very much effort, in fact, and Ashe finally says and does the right thing. This isn’t a perfect book by any means, but then what is? But it’s very well written, with a realistically evoked Regency era and no Americanisms or anachronisms that I noticed at all, and I enjoyed it so much that I can’t give it less than five stars.

This is the third and final part of the trilogy, and unlike book 2, it really does help to have read the earlier books first. This is the book where all the pigeons come home to roost, so to speak. In book 1, fortune hunter Jason, Lord Kilmore tried to elope with Alison Larkin. In book 2, he actually did elope with an heiress, but when that fell apart, he married another heiress, Penny Bryant. This book picks up the story a few weeks or months later. Jason has already gone to London, and his mother, his two sisters and his new wife are travelling south from their home near the Scottish border to join him. Penny is pregnant and finding morning sickness rather a trial, and Megan is suffering from a migraine. The ladies stop at an inn, and it’s shy, timid Thea who’s dispatched to secure rooms for them, since the other ladies aren’t up to the job.

But there’s a problem – the inn is full because of a sporting event, and there are no rooms to be had. Happily for the Kilmore ladies, a passing hero rescues them by giving up his room, and his friend’s, too, and then inviting the ladies to dine with them. The hero is the imposingly large Lord Hazlewood and his small but dandyish friend is Will DeVine. And so begins the odd friendship between these two and the Kilmore ladies.

While Thea, having led a sheltered life, struggles to behave and speak in the ladylike manner favoured by her mother, every time she puts her foot in it, Lord Hazlewood is there to smooth things over. He is the perfect courteous gentleman, and she begins to feel that she would not mind having to meet him again in London. So on to London the ladies go, their way smoothed by the thoughtful Lord Hazlewood.

There they find that Penny’s house is practically bare of furniture, everything having been trashed by her uncle before he moved out. Jason has managed to make repairs and supply the bare bones of the required furniture, but not much more. He’s also shocked by Penny’s exhausted appearance, and not at all the loving husband she’d hoped to find. And so, unusually for a Regency romance, even though these two appeared to have achieved their happy ending in the previous book, the state of their marriage becomes a central concern of this one, and even more so when previous events come back to haunt Jason and make Penny unhappy. It’s an interesting, and very realistic, scenario and I applaud the author for not assuming that everything in the garden will be rosy as soon as a girl has a ring on her finger.

Meanwhile our pair of heroes, Mr DeVine and Lord Hazlemere, are circling round the two Kilmore ladies, lively Megan and shy Thea, not at all put off (in Lord H’s case) and only slightly put off (in Mr DV’s) by the fact that they live in Russell Square, home of cits and lawyers. Of course the road to happiness is not smooth, and there’s the usual dramatic finale, but it’s clear that these two are both perfectly matched couples. I have to say, I liked all the characters in this book, and the way their stories played out. Thea learns to be more assertive, Lord Hazlewood learns the value of allowing his emotions free rein occasionally, and everything is tied up satisfactorily.

There’s only one aspect of the book that gave me pause. Lord Hazlewood has a mistress of many years’ standing. Now, he does pay her off once he realises he’s thinking of marrying Thea, but up until that point, he visits regularly and they seem to have a very cosy relationship, more like husband and wife than anything else. And then Lord Hazlewood is surprised when his mistress is upset at the break up. My question would be: how could he NOT be upset himself? Why is he not a least partly in love with her? I’m not sure I can like a man who is so detached about ending a relationship of many years.

But I suppose this is par for the course with books of this age. There’s a very different morality at play, where mistresses and wives are two different things, and occupy separate places in a man’s life. However shocking it looks to us now, the world was a different place thirty years ago. Apart from that, I have no real grumbles. I would have liked a little longer with our primary couple post-proposal, but that’s true of virtually every book of this vintage, so it’s not really a complaint. A lovely five-star read.

This was a complete riot. Two eloping couples meet on the way to Gretna Green, and as their journeys become more and more entwined, it becomes clear that the pairings are sadly mismatched. It’s a follow-on to A Lord For Miss Larkin, but there’s very little reference to that story, except that the hero here was the villain (of a sort) in the earlier book.

Here’s the premise: Jason, Lord Kilmore, is in desperate needs of funds to rescue him from penury. He tried in the previous book to elope with heiress Alison Larkin, but that came to nought. Now he’s eloping with heiress Henrietta White, who’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but pretty. And rich. Very, very rich. But when he arrives at Henrietta’s house in the dead of night, with a carriage awaiting them, the lady who drops into his arms, literally, from an upper window is not the delicate form of Henrietta, but the larger person of Penny Bryant. This scene is so redolent of Georgette Heyer’s The Corinthian, even to the name (Penelope) of the heroine that I was rather taken aback. However, it soon diverges as the two realise their mistake – they are both eloping, but not with each other. Jason has entered the wrong garden from the mews. Penny sets him right and they part amicably, Jason finds Henrietta, accompanied by her maid, a kitten and a mountain of luggage, and away they go.

Needless to say, the two couples, departing from the same spot and bound on the same journey, inevitably meet up several times on the road, and Jason and Penny are called upon to solve the many difficulties they encounter, many of them, it has to be said, created by Henrietta and her kitten (and who takes a kitten on an elopement?). Penny’s intended, the very Scottish Dr Angus Knox, is just as irritating as Henrietta in his way, especially when he descends into almost impenetrable dialect. I could have done with a lot less of the ‘dinnae ken’ and whatnot.

But our hero and heroine are lovely, and Jason redeems himself in spades for his behaviour in the previous book, when he was actually the villain of the piece, albeit a rather half-hearted one. And now we know why, because the author intended him to be the hero in this book. There’s a very nice ending, when Jason disposes in economical style of the villain of this book, and if it’s all very implausible, it’s also funny and oddly touching to see Jason the fortune-hunter rising to the occasion in magnificent style. A very enjoyable five stars.

I’m a fan of Carola Dunn’s Regencies, and although they don’t all work for me, that’s true of any author, and the writing is always superb, even if I do occasionally want to throttle the hero. But no such difficulties here. Mr Philip Trevelyan is the perfect hero, a man who makes things happen and can always be depended on, and he has almost superhuman powers of restraint, a characteristic which all Regency gentlemen should display but often don’t.

Here’s the premise: Miss Alison Larkin is living a hand-to-mouth existence in an unfashionable part of London, with a collection of gently eccentric aunts, three small dogs and one great big one (a Newfoundland, who turns out to have a starring role in the story). Another, even more eccentric, aunt returns, newly widowed, from India with her late husband’s fortune in her reticule. She’s determined to spend some of that money on Alison to give her a proper season, and a dowry to boot. None of the aunts is suited to sponsoring her in society, however, so the Nabob aunt engages Lady Emma Grant, the widow of a baron, to launch her.

At this point the story is the very conventional one of the unsophisticated debutante going through the usual rituals of buying new clothes, learning to dance, attending her first ball, hoping for vouchers from Almack’s and so forth. It’s very resonant of Georgette Heyer’s Arabella, with the beautiful young lady finding herself much sought after, and her suitors unaware of her humble background. The big difference is that Arabella is thought to be an heiress, whereas Alison actually is an heiress. The other principal difference is that Alison has set her heart on marrying a lord. I can’t remember whether any sensible reason was given for this or whether it was merely a whim, but although she understands that it’s unlikely, she is definitely leaning in that direction. Which is why she doesn’t even consider the very attractive Mr Philip Trevelyan, the first eligible man to cross her path in this new life of hers. It doesn’t help, of course, that he displays not the least interest in her, in fact, he seems rather to sneer at this upstart cit his good friend Emma has taken on. It also doesn’t help that the reader’s first sight of him is proposing to Emma (who fortunately turns him down).

As is the way of books of this era, Alison is pretty enough and lively enough and rich enough to spark a ton of interest from society gentlemen, and several of them are lords, too. There’s attractive but impoverished Lord Kilmore, for a start. Then there’s Alison’s charming cousin, Lord Deverill. And there’s steady but dull Lord Fane. And while Alison is focused on her bevy of lords, she’s slowly coming to depend on Philip, and he’s slowly coming to appreciate all her good points. So far, so predictable, and although her lords deplore the eccentric aunts and unfashionable home address, somehow it doesn’t stop Alison becoming a runaway success and getting those oh-so-important vouchers for Almack’s.

Now, none of this is enough to set the book much above the readable but unremarkable run of the mill for Regencies of the era. But towards the end, it manages to rise above the average in a most unusual way. This is somewhat spoilerish, so skip to the last paragraph if you don’t want to know any more.

When the other lords fall by the wayside, for one reason or another, and Lord Fane is the last one left standing, Philip does something quite remarkable. He’s well aware by this time that he wants to marry Alison, but he thinks she sees him merely as an avuncular white knight who rides to her rescue when needed. He thinks, too, that she truly wants to marry a lord. And why shouldn’t she have her wish? So he sets up a house party at his estate, invites Lord Fane and Alison, and leaves them to sort things out between them. As someone says to him, he’s taking a terrible risk, and if this story were to be written nowadays, undoubtedly the hero would muscle his way between heroine and lordly suitor, and do everything in his power to prevent the match. Or he might declare himself, and thus give her the choice. But no, with the true restraint of a Regency gentleman, he stands aside.

I have to say, though, that while I am totally in awe of such authentic principles, it puts the heroine in a terrible dilemma. It’s the great conundrum of life for a Regency heroine — does she accept the offer that’s on the table, even if it’s not perfect, or does she hold out for a better (or at least more palatable) offer, which may never happen? If she misjudges, she may end up married to the wrong man, or else left on the shelf altogether. This is why I’m always in favour of giving the heroine the full choice of options, and here her sponsor in society, Lady Emma, should have been alert to the possibility. She should have been whispering in her ear that Lord Fane was not the only man with a serious interest in her. How can Alison make a rational choice without all the information?

But of course, everything comes right in the end, although not without a little gratuitous melodrama to liven things up, and give the hero the opportunity to show off his heroic tendencies. A lovely read, beautifully written and totally authentic. Highly recommended. Five stars.

Well, what can I say? This was meant to be humorous, and I gave it the benefit of the doubt for most of the way through (and it was funny, actually), but the hero just stepped beyond the pale, for me.

Here’s the premise: Sarah Meade is the vicar’s sister, living a quiet life in a country parish and at the age of twenty-four, almost at the point of giving up on the prospect of marriage. Besides, she’s been in love with neighbour Adam, Viscount Cheverell, for years, but he looks on her as a sort of honorary sister. He’s the only son, with four highly-strung sisters, which has made him ultra-sympathetic to female troubles. He’s set up homes for unmarried mothers and schools, and he’s also managed to acquire three mistresses – simultaneously!

Now, some readers will back away at this point, but I like to give a book the benefit of the doubt with its basic premise, however implausible or unheroic, and see how things develop from there. Adam finds himself in difficulties with all three mistresses, so when he’s summoned home to deal with one of his troublesome sisters, the three follow him there. To avoid inflicting them on his rather strait-laced mother, he sends them round to the vicarage, for Sarah and brother Jonathan to deal with. Meanwhile his sisters are determined to see him married off, and descend on him with three candidates. He agrees that he probably ought to get married, and so begins a delicate dance around the three women, while also dealing with his three mistresses.

There’s no doubt that all this is very funny, if the reader can set aside the pearl-clutching that the three mistresses evoke. It’s meant to be light-hearted fluff, and given the date it was written (more than thirty years ago), mores were quite different then and the heroes of Regency romances were expected to be men’s men. Mistresses were just a normal part of the genre, and I don’t mind that (much). What got seriously up my nose is the despicable way Adam treats Sarah. Time after time he says (or thinks), “Oh, Sarah’s a good sport, she won’t mind,” and Sarah herself says at one point, “If he says that one more time, I’m going to scream.” And you can see her point. He treats her *really* badly, he expects her to deal with his mistresses, and then, when he gets himself entangled with all three of his marriage candidates, he expects her to sort that out, too!

Needless to say, it all comes right in the end, but I have to wonder just how faithful a husband Adam would be. He’s just too susceptible to womankind and (frankly) too stupid to avoid future entanglements, and he’s just the sort of idiot to think, “Oh well, it’ll be fine because Sarah will never know about it.” Ugh. So for me this only rates three stars, but it’s very well written, and for anyone less twitchy about male misbehaviour, looking for a light-hearted traditional read, this will probably suit you very well.

This was a whole heap of fun. It’s rather light-heartedly based on the frog prince story, and since it doesn’t belabour the point, it has an unusual degree of charm, with appealing characters and no artificial veering off into melodrama.

Here’s the premise: Simon Hurst is that staple of the Regency romance, the disregarded second son who is unexpectedly thrust into the position of heir. He’s the Earl of Derwent, leaving behind his happy career in the navy, but his father, the Marquis of Stokesbury is far from happy. He asks cousin Gerald, Viscount Litton, to take Simon up to town to add some polish to the rough navy man. Simon hates the stiff formality and constraining clothes of the fashionable world, but there are compensations, like a certain beautiful young lady. It’s only when Simon accidentally overhears said young lady telling a friend that she only wants him for his fortune and rank, and would take him even if he were a frog, that he realises his error. He sets off, incognito, for the estate of an aunt in Cheshire to recover his spirits and learn something of estate management, and there he meets Mimi…

The blurb describes Mimi as ‘half English, half Indian and all mischief’, which hits the nail precisely on the head. She’s always up to some scheme or other, and Simon encounters her catching tadpoles to raise, for various complicated reasons. When she drops her bracelet into the water and Simon recovers it for her, he extracts from her three wishes – to dine with him, dance with him and to kiss him. She has no intention of complying, but he is intrigued and sets about ensuring that she fulfils her side of the bargain.

Mimi and Simon are both delightful characters. He is one of my favourite hero types, a sensible man very much at ease with himself who knows what he wants and sets about getting it with steady determination. And Mimi is such a rare thing in Regencies – a young and mischievous spirit who may get carried away sometimes but is entirely good-hearted and not in the least silly. Gerald, the urbane and dashing man-about-town is not so much a sidekick as another well-rounded hero, and Harriet the vicar’s daughter, who knows her place and isn’t unrealistic, but would so very much like to get married, is lovely too. There is a whole army of minor characters, and frankly I never got most of them straight in my head, but it didn’t matter. The whole book simply oozes charm, and made me smile all the way through.

There are difficulties, of course. For Mimi and Simon, there’s the problem that he is pretending to be a bailiff, and therefore would be viewed as a fortune-hunter if he openly courts Mimi. He wants her to fall in love with him for his own sake, and not just because he’s the heir to a marquisate. And for Gerald and Harriet, there’s the huge disparity of rank, although frankly this is a difficult obstacle to take seriously when half the Regency romances ever written have some form of it. It would be a different matter for a peer’s daughter to ‘marry down’ but men did it all the time (in real life as well as between the covers of books).

I do have one serious grumble, however. The romances chug along rather splendidly for most of the book, developing slowly and rather naturally. And then, bam, the most perfunctory wrapping up you can imagine. I’m not a fan of the elongated and mushy epilogue, but I do like a somewhat more romantic ending than this. Mimi switches without comment from trying to pair Simon off with Harriet (and feeling unaccountably dismal about the prospect) to talking about love, without any sign of a revelatory moment (unless somehow I missed it). And the proposal scenes are brief to the point of brusqueness. Not a happy camper about that. I can only assume the author was given a word limit by her publisher and had a bit of a scramble to fit everything in, but it was all very unsatisfactory.

But with that proviso, this is a lovely and very charming traditional read, amusing and light but with some serious themes of friendship and class beneath the froth. I thoroughly enjoyed it – right up until the final chapter or two, which knocks it down to four stars.