{"id":2117,"date":"2019-08-06T15:50:23","date_gmt":"2019-08-06T15:50:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/?p=2117"},"modified":"2021-08-25T15:48:21","modified_gmt":"2021-08-25T15:48:21","slug":"review-stranger-within-the-gates-by-mira-stables","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/2019\/08\/06\/review-stranger-within-the-gates-by-mira-stables\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Stranger Within The Gates by Mira Stables (1976) [Trad]"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"This was a very pleasant surprise. It\u2019s an old book, previously released in 1976, and now available in ebook form, so it\u2019s very much old school. That means it\u2019s pretty wordy with not a huge amount of action and the characters conform to the expectations of the day – the hero is a domineering rake and the heroine is delightfully feminine and demure\u2026 no, wait. These two are nothing like that at all, both being intelligent and mature, and thank goodness for a story about an older-than-average couple.<\/p>\n

Robert Develyn married badly and went off adventuring in foreign parts when his wife ran off with someone else. Now she\u2019s dead and at the age of forty, he\u2019s returned to England to settle into rural retirement and raise his young daughter. He\u2019s been left an estate in Kent, but he hasn\u2019t seen it or its previous owner for donkey\u2019s years and he finds that a few things have changed.<\/p>\n

For one thing, there\u2019s a new house just inside the gates, inhabited by the household of one Miss Francesca Thornish, past the age of looking for a suitor and eccentric enough to enjoy dressing up in men\u2019s clothes when she feels like it. She is thus when Robert first encounters her. He thinks she\u2019s an idle gatekeeper, and she thinks he\u2019s excessively rude, and so they get off on quite the wrong foot.<\/p>\n

But the rest of the book chronicles their slow progress towards grudging respect, tolerance, liking and eventually love. This is, to my mind, quite the best kind of romance, and there\u2019s no silliness, no misunderstandings, just two sensible people, set in their ways, slowly coming to realise that their lives have utterly changed.<\/p>\n

Both characters are interesting, but Francesca is fascinating. She\u2019s something I thought was impossible – a Regency heroine who has all the independence of spirit of a modern woman yet is completely true to her era. When she does put on a pretty gown and become the lady of society, the effect is heightened by knowing what she\u2019s like the rest of the time. She\u2019s a pattern-card of respectability only when and if she chooses to be, and nobody forces her to do anything she doesn\u2019t want to do. And while we\u2019re on the subject of characters, a round of applause for the deceased Earl of Finmore, the previous owner of Robert\u2019s new estate and Francesca\u2019s protector, who (despite being dead) is one of the liveliest characters in the book.<\/p>\n

The end is complicated by some contrived business with the horse and a not very plausible villain, but by this point it didn\u2019t matter. This is a lovely, old-fashioned Regency that I highly recommend. Five stars.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This was a very pleasant surprise. It\u2019s an old book, previously released in 1976, and now available in ebook form, so it\u2019s very much old school. That means it\u2019s pretty wordy with not a huge amount of action and the characters conform to the expectations of the day – the hero is a domineering rake […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[147],"class_list":["post-2117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review","tag-stables"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2117"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2117\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3691,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2117\/revisions\/3691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}