An oddly disjointed book, which I found difficult to get into, although I’m not sure why. The hero and heroine were perfectly fine, the romance burbled along nicely and there was a great deal of Regency restraint and propriety on display, which is all estimable. Yet somehow I was unmoved.

Here’s the premise: orphaned Nell Armstrong has lived with her cantankerous spinster Aunt Longstreet for ten years, during which time she’s gone nowhere, met no one, done nothing except watch her aunt alienate the neighbours. Now the aunt has decided out of the blue to travel to Bath (from Westmorland!) to take the waters, even though other spas like Harrogate are much closer. Nell is suspicious, but a trip is a trip and she’s determined to make the most of it. At Bath, they meet the aunt’s godson and heir, Sir Hugh Nowlin, and his lively sister Emily, who take Nell under their wing. They both feel sorry for her, living with her difficult aunt, and try to improve her life in their different ways. Hugh would like to improve his own by marrying her, but there’s a problem: he’s broke and he doesn’t know which of them will end up inheriting the aunt’s estate, and if it’s Nell, he can’t possibly court her.

There’s a mystery in the aunt’s history involving recently widowed Lord Westwick, and there’s some minor business with Emily’s husband and a librarian who is set up as a rival for Nell’s affections, but essentially this is the story. I didn’t dislike Hugh or Nell, although they both seem rather too good to be true, what with Hugh agonising over whether he can marry Nell or not, and Nell regarding herself as bound by a deathbed promise years before. As for Lord Westwick, he is a positive fairy godfather, although there might be plot reasons for that. In fact, Aunt Longstreet is the only character who has any kind of bad traits in her makeup at all.

All of this makes the story just a shade dull. I really wanted something melodramatic to happen to shake things up (and it’s not often I say that). In the end, people behave rationally, find logical ways round the constraints that held them back and only the librarian’s story doesn’t get much of a look in at the end. Still, it’s nicely written, if you don’t mind the usual array of Americanisms (gotten and the like), and if it doesn’t have much emotional depth, it’s still a pleasantly enjoyable read. Four stars.

An odd little book, a bit lacking in the romance department and with far too many not particularly interesting characters milling about at the side of the stage, but very readable.

Here’s the premise: Kate Montgomery is settling back into domestic country life after several far more exciting years travelling with her widowed aunt. Her younger sister is about to make her debut in London, but Kate’s past the age of looking for a husband. But one day she receives an astonishing five proposals, one after the other. I’m going to take issue with this right from the start. Usually I can grant a book its opening premise, but not here. The idea is that this is an amusing prank organised by her dippy brother amongst her friends, but frankly, a proposal of marriage in the Regency wasn’t something to be taken lightly. If Kate had said yes to one of them, he would have been honour bound to marry her. Saying it was just a joke won’t cut it. So that’s a pretty silly start.

From then onwards, the story branches out into a multitude of side stories, some of which work better than others, but frankly the book would have been much stronger if it had dispensed with most of those and shed more of a spotlight on the two principals, Kate and her haughty aristocratic neighbour, the Earl of Winterton. He’s a starchy sort of man, although arrogant seems like a better word for it, but with Kate, he’s downright rude. But that’s alright, because she’s rude right back at him.

There’s an interesting reason for the antagonism. Some years ago, Winterton’s brother Carl wanted to marry Kate but she turned him down. He went off to fight in the war, but when he died he left her a substantial legacy (twenty thousand pounds, a tidy sum). Winterton disapproved of Kate accepting it. So did a number of other people, since it really wasn’t done to leave a fortune to a woman who wasn’t a relation of any sort, but Winterton took his disapproval to extremes. So now they snipe at each other constantly, and even though the reader knows that these two are going to get together, it’s hard to see how. It’s well past the 50% point before he notices how pretty she is.

The author rather cleverly chips away at his haughtiness by putting him in humiliating situations, and as they’re repeatedly thrown together they do begin to develop some respect for each other. When they all transfer to town for the season, he actually starts rather tentatively to court Kate, before one of the pesky side plots drags her away. And then it’s just a downhill run to the declarations of love.

I said the book is lacking, romantically, and frankly it’s so limply unemotional that it never actually builds up a head of steam. I make due allowances for its age (1979!) but even for a traditional read it’s pretty tepid stuff. I also disliked the amount of banal dialogue the author saw fit to inflict on the reader. We really don’t need all the greetings and how-are-yous and how was your journey and a recap of all the recent plot developments. It’s tedious.

This sounds pretty critical, but actually it rolled along pretty well, and I was absorbed in it from start to finish. It’s a little too bland for five stars, but it’s a good four stars for me.

This is an odd sort of book. The reviews are mixed, to put it mildly, and I honestly thought I was going to hate it, and especially the nasty, suspicious, cheating husband, but I found it unexpectedly compelling. Strange.

Note: There’s not much of a graphic nature in the book, but the whole premise and the difficulties between hero and heroine centre on sexual matters, so if you prefer a more traditional read, avoid this one.

Here’s the premise: Jason, Lord Clayborne, and his new wife Rebecca hit a crisis on their wedding night. He discovers after consummation that she hasn’t bled, and everyone knows that virgins always bleed the first time, don’t they? Ergo, she’s not a virgin. He might just possibly be prepared to overlook this heinous crime if she would just confess to it and apologise, but she doesn’t. In fact, she’s initially mystified by his pointing to the sheets (“What do you see?” “Nothing…”), but this doesn’t clue him in. He explains, she’s horrified, can’t account for the lack of blood but assures him she’s innocent of any such behaviour. He is so outraged by this wilful refusal to admit to her crime that he abandons her to shoot all over the country, including visits to London to take up with his former mistress (as we learn later). Meanwhile Rebecca uncomplainingly busies herself with running the house and waiting patiently for her husband to come to his senses.

Now, at this point, Jason is a pretty unlikeable hero, right? Refusing to believe his wife, arrogantly assuming he knows everything there is to know about the female body and then huffily consoling himself with another woman – it’s not a great look. And a lot of the negative reviews focus on that, which is understandable. But I have some sympathy with his position. Even today, there are plenty of misunderstandings between men and women, and even when a man may know something of the workings of women in general, he may not know just how the particular one he’s intimate with works. And in the Regency, when there was no internet and not much public discussion of the facts of anatomy, it would have been much easier for a man to be ignorant of the wide variety of womanhood.

So I can totally accept that he may not have known that some women don’t bleed the first time, and if he genuinely believed that she’d deceived him, his anger and hurt are all too understandable. A certain amount of avoidance of his wife would be expected in anyone of less than saintly character, and although the mistress is generally a no-no in a hero, I can see how he might have been so thrown off his axis that a determined woman could successfully seduce him. It’s bad, but it’s forgivable, I’d say, although I see why others may think differently.

The best part of a year goes by, and they’re still estranged, but a multitude of new characters turn up, so there’s a trip to London and then back to the country, during which time Jason and Rebecca are thrown together more than they have been, and he definitely starts to soften. It’s clear that he’s being gradually drawn back to her, just as when he was courting her. It’s obvious to the reader that he’s in love with her and perhaps he always has been, but he’s not quite ready to be open with her. Probably a mistake, but it’s very much in keeping with his character.

But in London Rebecca discovers that he saw his mistress again after he was married, and that is the final straw. She takes off with yet another new character to live apart from Jason, and she won’t even tell him where she’s going. And because he loves her and can’t bear her to be unhappy, he lets her go and even ups her allowance so she can afford to keep her horse.

This is the point at which any half-sensible hero would have come clean about his feelings. Something along the lines of ‘I love you and surely we can work this out without you leaving? Let’s talk about what might work.’ But of course talking is too simple, so we have to suffer through the whole separation thing before the author conjures up a tediously silly and overwrought subplot to bring the hero charging to the rescue.

By this time, he’s finally discovered that – oh noes! He was wrong about the whole bleeding thing so maybe his wife is innocent of wrongdoing after all. He’ll have to grovel and (at last!) tell her he loves her. But she’s constantly rushing round after other people and it’s hard to get a moment alone with her, and when he does, he decides the time isn’t right for grovelling, so we have to suffer through yet another tediously silly and overwrought subplot before he finally gets to grovel. It’s probably not a sufficiently grovelly sort of grovel, considering the hell he put her through, but it does the trick, since (fortuitously) she’s in love with him too. And that’s another thing some reviews take issue with, but since he’s actually very nice to his wife, apart from the whole abandonment and mistress thing, I can see where she’s coming from.

So for me, the main plot worked pretty well and I think the author did a good job of making both hero and heroine (mostly) likeable and understandable. My only real complaint is the plethora of plot-device extra characters who were wheeled on in the second half, and those tediously silly and overwrought subplots. There was also far too much space given to the minor characters, especially the garrulous governess and piously lazy clergyman (not amusing enough) and the annoyingly precocious child (not cute enough). All in all, about a third of the book and half the characters could have been dispensed with, without great loss. There are a few Americanisms, but nothing to frighten the horses. Too much talk of sexual matters for traditionalists, but I enjoyed it. Four stars.

A strange contrast with the first book in the series. That was riveting, with a fascinating premise and intriguing characters, an absolute page turner from the start. This was… well, just a little bit boring.

Here’s the premise: poor relation and companion Jenny Holloway has been given the modest independence of the title, five thousand pounds which will allow her to travel and see the world. Initially, she wants to travel to India to see if she can’t find out what really happened to the Earl of Castleton. Is he really dead? If not, whatever became of him? Solicitor Tom Finchley helps her by releasing her money and making travel arrangements. And at the last minute, he decides he can’t let her go all that way with only servants, so he goes with her himself.

And if that were all, this book would be half its length (and probably all the better for it). But Tom likes Jenny rather more than he should, and proposes that they become affectionate companions. It’s not a courtship, since neither of them wants to marry, merely an acknowledgement of an attraction between them. This is where I take issue with him, because what on earth does he expect to happen if they get close and affectionate on a long journey involving boats and trains and who knows what else? The pair fall ever deeper in love, that’s what happens, all the while knowing that there’s no prospect of marriage. Jenny plans to stay abroad indefinitely and Tom will go back to London to take up his life as a solicitor, so they have no future as a couple, and I can’t quite forgive him for behaviour that can only lead both of them to deep unhappiness.

Nevertheless, that is what he does, so the first half, at least, of the book consists of the two of them kissing and touching and getting ever closer, while angsting continuously about it. The travel itself, while obviously well researched, is not particularly interesting and the endless introspection is, frankly, dull. Things liven up a bit when they get to Delhi and start asking about Lord Castleton. The mystery part of the story unfurls pretty much as you’d expect. And then the adventure is over, Jenny and Tom leave India and head back to Egypt where Jenny is going to stay for their final separation. And finally, finally Tom does the truly heroic thing – he respects Jenny’s wishes and leaves her there to begin her new life without him, even though it breaks his heart.

I want to have a grumble here about the whole missing earl thing. The 6th Earl has been declared dead on the say so of one eye-witness in the middle of an intense battle, although his body was never found. That is apparently enough for the powers that be in London to accept, so the will is executed and the 7th Earl steps forward. Then Jenny goes off to India to (possibly) find the missing earl. And no one, at any time, ever considers the ramifications if he should happen to be alive. The new earl displaced. The dispositions of the will to be untangled. In practice, of course, no one would have accepted the earl was dead without a great deal more evidence, and a body, at the very least. So whether the earl is ever found or not, the potential ramifications should have been very much in everyone’s mind. It may seem a small point, but I can’t quite forgive it.

My other big grumble is the way the two principals behave and their endless agonising over it. I’m not not a big fan of angsty books, and this one is practically wall-to-wall angst. In every other respect the book is beautifully written, and I’m sure the research is spot on, so if you like travelogues and/or angst, you’ll love this book. For me though it was only a three star read, and a disappointment after the sharpness of the first book.

This was so close to being a five star read – an intriguing premise, fascinating characters, an atmospheric setting and lots of promise for dramatic revelations – what could go wrong? I’ll get to that.

Here’s the premise: Justin Thornhill has managed to hoist himself up from humble beginnings to buy a run-down house in the West Country. All he needs is a wife to help him run the place. Helena Reynolds needs to escape from London, and she’s desperate enough to answer a matrimonial advertisement. She’ll marry a complete stranger if he’ll keep her safe. I find this a fascinating premise. It’s obvious that both these two have dark stories to tell. Justin is an ex-soldier with scars and burns covering his body. Helena has bruises to hide, too. But they accept each other as they are, and they quickly marry.

Instantly, Helena’s past turns up to disrupt them, and Justin’s fears that she’s too grand to be marrying the likes of him are fully realised. But he does what he has agreed to do, and gets rid of the men who would take her back to London and all the horrors she wanted so badly to escape from. I won’t spoil things by going into details about either her past or Justin’s, but suffice it to say that she is being pursued by a very powerful person.

Up to the halfway point, this is a fascinating story, beautifully realised and steeped in atmosphere and mystery. The two main characters are wonderfully real in all their interactions (a bit of a beauty and the beast vibe going on there), and the clifftop abbey and its odd inhabitants suitably gothic. I did wonder if it always rained quite so much in Devon, and maybe they could have just the occasional balmy day, but it was certainly atmospheric.

But the second half, where Helena and Justin go to London and do all sorts of conventional things – balls, morning calls, the theatre – is much less interesting, and at the very end, the biggest problem of all – an outbreak of I’m-not-worthy-itis from Justin, so that he takes off back to Devon and Helena’s not invited. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, even more than a Great Misunderstanding, it’s a hero who simply assumes he knows what’s best for the heroine. Look, selfless heroes everywhere, treat your heroines with a bit of respect, all right? They’re sensible people with hopes and fears and feelings too, so ASK what they want before self-righteously sloping off and leaving them with a broken heart.

But other than that, I don’t have much to grumble about. This is set in the Victorian era, not the more familiar (to me) Regency, so some things that seemed odd to me might be quite legitimate. The talk of annulment, for instance – very much not a thing in the Regency, but maybe it’s fine by the mid-Victorian era. I did wonder that the 6th Earl was so easily declared dead on the say-so of just one person. Usually with titles, the fear of making a mistake kept the title in abeyance unless there was an actual body. And I disapproved hugely of leaving the money that usually supported a title to someone else entirely. Being a peer was an expensive business, and the poor man was supposed to live in a manner appropriate for his station, not in penury. And why was the income from the estate not tied to the entailed land, in the form of rent-paying tenant farmers, as was usual? So I wasn’t quite sure how that worked.

Still, these are trivial points. The book is beautifully written, it feels authentic to its time (and I loved the way Helena’s big skirts were a constant reminder of that) and the two main characters were wonderful. Justin, in particular, is a true hero. Only that stupid last-minute outbreak of unworthiness annoyed me enough to keep it to four stars. And now I’m going straight on to the next book in the series to find out just what did happen to Giles.

Oh dear. Two fairly hard-to-like principals, a very uneven plot, some over-the-top silliness from the heroine, and a rabbit-from-the-hat romance (you know how this one goes: I don’t like you… I don’t like you… oh, I’m in love). I kept reading because… well, I’ll get to that, but boy, was it a slog, sometimes.

Here’s the premise: Trelenny Storwood is the only child of her parents. Cranford Ashwicke is the only son of the neighbours. So naturally they’re expected to marry. Cranford is dutifully courting Trelenny… no, wait a minute. What sort of name is Trelenny? If this was set in Cornwall, I could just about accept it, but in Westmorland? And Cranford isn’t much better. This at a time when half the baptisms in England were for Anne, Elizabeth, Mary or Charlotte (for girls) or John, Edward, William or George (for boys).

Anyway, Cranford is courting Trelenny, even though he thinks she’s a hoyden and every time he meets her, he ends up correcting her behaviour. As for Trelenny, she just thinks he’s dull, not to mention old (at twenty-eight!). They snipe at each other constantly, more like brother and sister than a courting couple, so although Cranford has officially asked permission to pay his addresses, he hasn’t officially asked her yet because he’s pretty sure she’ll refuse.

So the big question is – why on earth is he even bothering with this courtship, when neither of them is very keen on the other? I confess, that’s the question that pulled me along through the swamps of implausibility that bogged down much of this book. We don’t get an answer until almost the end, when there’s a rush of revelations, some of which actually made some sense. But by then it was a bit too late to redeem things.

Here’s one of the more problematic elements, for me. Quite early in the book, Cranford pays a visit to a very classy brothel, where he has dinner, plays some cards and then beds his favourite lady. He seems to have a very cosy relationship with her, is fond of her and regrets that he isn’t rich enough to keep her as his mistress. She tells him not to worry because she’d rather work at the (very classy) brothel and have friends around her. Which is all very cosy and all, but what is the hero of a Regency romance doing in a brothel anyway? Nor is this a final farewell before he settles down to marriage and faithfulness. So yuk to that.

Then there’s the uncle who turns up and immediately starts pawing Trelenny (and her mother!), and neither of them makes a fuss because the father has heart trouble and the stress might make him pop off. So instead, they take off for Bath with Cranford, something that Trelenny has been angling for for a while, having had a very curtailed rural life and quite understandably wanting to see a bit of life before she settles down to domestic bliss. Or marriage to dull Cranford.

But then on the journey there’s an outbreak of stupidity on Trelenny’s part that almost broke the silly-o-meter. It involves her dressing up in men’s clothes, roaming the streets at night and eventually getting roaring drunk, and all because she’s too silly to say no. There’s an eloping couple involved, and although they do have a small part to play later, I’m going to say that I think the whole point of this whole episode was so that Cranford had to undress the drunk-unconscious Trelenny and get her into her nightgown and into bed. Yuk to that, too.

Bath gets quite interesting, because Trelenny discovers to her dismay that it’s not at all like her dreams and really, it’s all a bit hit and miss, just like every other part of real life. This was really nicely done. Meanwhile Cranford is being pursued with vigour by a former squeeze, and he actually does the right thing here and rejects her, but for the wrong reason (because he’s got his little friend in the brothel if he wants that sort of thing). So yuk again. And he’s also hanging out with an old friend, Lady Jane, who seems to Trelenny’s eyes to be a much better match for him, so she’s convinced that she’s lost him for good.

I’ll spare you the details of the rest of it. Naturally it all comes right in the end, and reasons are given for the various misunderstandings and motivations, but I was really past caring at that point. There were some nice lines – Bath is described as a ‘mushroomy watering hole’, for instance, but there are a number of Americanisms, like stoop, visit with and ‘on High Street’ (Brits would say ‘on the High Street’). I never warmed to Cranford and his dodgy moral compass, but I quite grew to like Trelenny in the end, even if she was made to veer between utter stupidity and common sense to suit the purposes of the plot. Ultimately there were too many yuks and the plot was too uneven for me to give this more than three stars.

I’ve read several Laura Matthews books, and I’ve enjoyed them all, something that’s not usual in authors of this era, where the catalogue tends to be spotty. But this was a perfectly judged blend of a second-chance romance with a happy family setting and a treasure hunt thrown in for good measure. There’s a half-hearted villain but his villainy never really amounts to much. This is just good old-fashioned fun, with some unusually good writing underneath.

Here’s the premise: Theodosia Tremere is the daughter of a clergyman, who almost married Viscount Steyne some years previously. Her father having died, she’s now taken up a position as governess to the charming Heythrop family, headed by Lady Eastwick. Her husband is abroad, so the family is headed by her eldest son, twenty-year-old Edward, who is finding his new responsibilities difficult. There are two younger brothers and three daughters, and all of them are delightful. It’s unusual and very refreshing to encounter a completely happy family in a Regency, and also one where the governess is not only treated with respect by the family, but has pupils who are lively but not mischievous. For the summer, Theodosia has a plan to get all the children out and about by instituting a search for the long-lost family treasure.

Into this pleasant setting comes the sort-of villain, Uncle James, who, having run through his own money and finding his debts rather pressing, is planning to marry a rich widow. As a way of convincing her that he’s serious, he invites the widow’s brother to view his estate, to prove that he’s not just a fortune hunter. As his estate adjoins the Heythrop family’s estate, and his own is run down, he and his guest stay with the Heythrops. And by happy coincidence, the guest happens to be Theodosia’s former suitor, Viscount Steyne.

Seasoned Regency readers will know the way the romance will go — a certain amount of initial hostility, followed by a gradual thawing and realisation that yes, they really can start again and make it stick this time. There were some wonderful conversations between the two, with real emotion roiling through them, especially in Steyne (I love it when the hero is the one doing the bulk of the agonising). In books of this age, the romance is often a bit staid, not to say downright perfunctory, but not so here. There’s enough angst here that it could have been dropped straight into a modern novel (and although I’m not in general a fan of too much angst, here I mean it as a compliment).

The treasure hunt (and the villainy) is just a lot of fun, and if the solution to the mystery was too easily found in the end, I can’t quite see how else it could have been done, so I won’t quibble. There are not so many Americanisms as in some of the author’s work (the inevitable gotten, and fall instead of autumn, but I didn’t notice anything else). My only big question-mark is over the amount of time the hero spent in the heroine’s bedroom, in some cases uninvited, and in one case refusing to leave. It was treated as a comedy interlude, so she nipped into the dressing room to put her nightie on and then climbed into bed, then punctured his vanity totally by falling asleep! Even so, it raised my eyebrows somewhat. I wondered whether this was the meaning of the title (which is singularly inappropriate otherwise).

But these minor grumbles aside, I really loved this book, loved both Steyne and Theodosia (whom he rather charmingly calls Doe) and can’t give it less than five stars.

Another odd book from Laura Matthews. I enjoyed it well enough, but the quirky side characters were unredeemably awful, I didn’t particularly like either of the two main characters and the intrusive sexual element felt jarring.

Here’s the premise: Vanessa Damery has been a widow for two years, with two small children to raise and her husband’s much-neglected estate to manage, with no help from her fellow trustee. In addition, she’s been inundated with a variety of her husband’s relations and assorted hangers-on, which her kind-hearted parents tell her it’s her Christian duty to support. Into this difficult situation belatedly arrives the missing trustee, Lord Alvescot, very much aware of his condescension in doing so, and quite prepared to find everything in disarray at the hands of a mere woman. And just why are her expenses so high, anyway? His arrival is marred by a collision with the recklessly driven curricle of one of the hangers-on, his expected suitably large bedroom isn’t available, and in the poky room he’s assigned, a flimsy chair promptly collapses under his weight. Not an auspicious start.

I have to say, for anyone who’s a fan of curmudgeonly heroes, Alvescot is a spectacular example of the breed. He dislikes and distrusts everyone, is universally hostile and thoroughly charmless, and then there’s his aristocratic arrogance. But then Vanessa is edgy with him, too, not rude precisely but certainly prepared to give as good as she gets. Meanwhile, the hangers-on are as dismal a bunch as one can imagine, and it’s hard to see why she keeps supporting them, let alone have them living under her roof. In the whole household, only the children and the land steward are nice, normal, friendly people.

I was a little surprised that Vanessa was left so alone to take care of everything. Her husband’s relations are just spongers, not one of them having the commonsense to make themselves useful, or help in any way, apart from the one proposing vastly extravagant menus. And did she have no relations of her own who might have helped out? It would have been very unusual in those days for a woman to be managing an estate of any size. Normally the trustees would all be male. But there is a very poignant moment when she has to take the authoritative role, not one she’s ever been trained for and which goes against all her instincts, but she does it, and ends up shaking afterwards. That felt very real, to me, and was the point where I felt real sympathy for her.

The romance has a lot of ground to cover to get from mutual hostility to happy ending, and frankly I never found it very convincing. He gradually comes to see that she’s doing a good job with both the estate and the children under difficult circumstances, and inch by inch he begins to want to relieve her of some of the burdens. And of course, if he’d been remotely doing his job as fellow trustee from the start, she wouldn’t have had nearly so much to contend with. What she sees in him is less obvious. He starts off disliking her quite intensely, and when that starts to change into something else, he starts touching her. Now, holding her hand at a moment of stress is one thing, but he rests his hand on her shoulder at one point and starts playing with her hair, during an otherwise rational conversation, and frankly that just felt creepy to me. Then he kisses her and goes away without a word, leaving her uncertain, and sends her only businesslike letters. Foolish man.

Needless to say, the two do sort themselves out eventually, as well as seeing off the hangers-on, and the final night-time shenanigans with one particular lady are almost worth the price of admission alone, and single-handedly dragged the book from a grudging three stars up to four. I’ve mentioned the sex, which is not particularly graphic but didn’t add much to the story, although to be fair, with a widow, there ought to be some acknowledgement of it, and particularly whether the first marriage was satisfactory or not. For pedants out there, be warned that there’s a good sprinkling of Americanisms, especially ‘gotten’, but generally this felt very Heyeresque in tone. Despite the criticisms, I still enjoyed the read, and if this is a bit different from the usual Regency fare, I’m always happy to wander away from the familiar roads.