I enjoyed this up to a point, but I found it by far too wordy, with too little actual plot and too much philosophical wrangling.

Here’s the premise: Anne Calder is the despair of her family, choosing not to marry and thereby getting in the way of her younger sisters’ prospects, and preferring to write novels than look for a husband. Her first novel, based on the country life she knows well, is to be published soon, and she wants to write a follow-up on town life, but how can she, with so little knowledge of it? So she devises a cunning plan – she will take a position as a lowly governess in town, masquerading as the impoverished daughter of a country parson, and gain some experience of town life that way.

Now, this is an excellent start – a governess who actually isn’t a downtrodden and impoverished not-quite-a-lady, and who doesn’t in fact need the job at all. One could quibble at her taking up a position that could be given to someone who actually needs it, and also at the selfishness of worming her way into a child’s affections for what must be only a temporary position, but never mind.

She finds work with Sir Basil Ives, the determined bachelor of the title, a distinguished diplomat and ambassador, who has just become guardian to Nicole, a child of nine, and hasn’t the first clue how to deal with her. At first he thinks his cousins, who have children of their own, might be prevailed on to take her in, but he quickly sees that they’re unsuitable so he engages Anne as a governess. He’s very stiff and, frankly, unlikable, but he has the good sense to realise that Anne knows how to deal with children so he starts to unbend sufficiently to ask her advice.

Nicole is one of those precocious children who would be insufferable in real life, but is made to seem cute on the page, so I’ll let her off that. And Anne is just so very accomplished at… well, absolutely everything, but she’s the heroine, so I suppose I’ll let her off that, too. But Basil… well. We get glimpses of a softer, more relaxed Basil, but we never see him actually fall in love with Anne. If I’m being generous, I’ll concede that it’s all there but written between the lines, but it’s written in such small letters that it’s almost impossible to see. So when, most of the way through the book, he finally reveals his feelings, it’s a case of about time, too!

I never did quite work out his family relationships. There’s some suggestion that he’s in line to inherit his cousin’s earldom through his mother, but that’s unlikely (without a bit more explanation) so I ignored it. And then at the end, he does inherit, even though the cousin had sons, which made no sense to me at all, so I ignored that, too. But in a book of this vintage, ie pre-internet, I forgive a certain amount of fudging of historical details.

I did manage to read this to the end, if only to see how stiff old Sir Basil finally unbends, but I can’t say I enjoyed it very much. The interactions between hero and heroine tended to be of a high-flown philosophical nature, with absolutely nothing romantic about them, and the heroine’s inner musings were not much better. Besides that, very little happened apart from one misunderstanding near the end, although it was an understandable misunderstanding, if you see what I mean, and therefore forgivable. It is very well written, however, with only a smattering of Americanisms and other oddities, so I’ve given it three stars.