{"id":4039,"date":"2021-10-06T12:26:54","date_gmt":"2021-10-06T12:26:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/?p=4039"},"modified":"2021-10-06T12:26:54","modified_gmt":"2021-10-06T12:26:54","slug":"review-the-obedient-bride-by-mary-balogh-1989","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/2021\/10\/06\/review-the-obedient-bride-by-mary-balogh-1989\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: The Obedient Bride by Mary Balogh (1989)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mary Balogh is a brilliant writer and one of her greatest talents is to create a unique situation for her characters and then let that work itself out in the most logical and not always the easiest way. This is a marriage of convenience story, but it looks with uncompromising honesty at what a great many Regency marriages must have been like. It\u2019s about expectations of marriage, and yes, it\u2019s about how sex plays into that, so it\u2019s not a traditional read, nor is it a comfortable tale, so anyone looking for light-hearted fluff should move on. It is, however, both powerful and fascinating.<\/p>\n

\"\"Here\u2019s the premise: Lord Astor has recently come into his title and estates, and knows he has an obligation to marry to secure the succession. He also owes an obligation to the widow and daughters of his predecessor, who have been left unprovided for. He can fulfil both requirements at once by marrying one of the daughters. He\u2019s never met them, for the relationship is a distant one, but he\u2019s unbothered by which one it should be. After all, what does it matter? His wife won\u2019t be a big part of his life, will she? Apart from producing a few children, she\u2019ll have her own life and he\u2019ll keep his mistress and his masculine friends and pursuits. So he leaves it up to their mother to decide which one is most appropriate. Since the eldest daughter and beauty of the family, Frances, is likely to marry a neighbour, she puts forward her second daughter, Arabella, to marry the viscount. And after a brief period of misunderstanding, and thinking he\u2019s going to get the beauty, he swallows his disappointment and proposes to Arabella, the small, plump one.<\/p>\n

The ladies had a misunderstanding, too, for they thought the viscount was an older man. Arabella, thinking herself plain and uninteresting, is quite happy to marry such a man and have a placid marriage, leaving her sister free to marry the man she\u2019s in love with. But the older man was Lord Astor\u2019s father, now dead, and the son is something of a paragon – handsome, fashionable, with perfect manners, and everything that Arabella would never dare to dream of and doesn\u2019t feel worthy of. She\u2019s reduced to stumbling inarticulacy in his presence. She tells him, however, that she\u2019ll be a dutiful and obedient wife and he\u2019s satisfied. That\u2019s what he wants, after all, someone he can basically ignore while he lives his own life, just as he did before.<\/p>\n

So the marriage takes place, and yes, it\u2019s consummated, and no, Balogh doesn\u2019t shy away from the details. It\u2019s not outrageously graphic, but it\u2019s clear that Lord Astor has very fixed ideas about sex. What he enjoys with his mistress is purely for pleasure, and he wouldn\u2019t expect anything as uninhibited as that with his respectable and chaste wife. Instead, she gets sex for procreation, perfunctory and by the sound of it deeply unpleasant. She meekly puts up with it, because she\u2019s an obedient wife and it\u2019s her duty.<\/p>\n

The interesting element of this is that Lord Astor is doing his duty, too. He\u2019s not an unkind man, in fact he\u2019s rather gentlemanly and considerate. He willingly takes Arabella to town with her beautiful sister for company, he escorts them everywhere, rigs them out in fashionable clothes and supervises Arabella\u2019s transformation to stylish woman-about-town. And he genuinely thinks he\u2019s being considerate by keeping the procreation efforts to brief sessions in the dark, without any embarrassing foreplay. But all the time, he keeps his mistress and is rather surprised to find himself losing interest in her, and actually enjoying his wife\u2019s company instead. He even finds himself distracted during sessions with his mistress by thoughts of his wife.<\/p>\n

And so the stage is set for the transformation that will upset the applecart. Arabella gradually gains confidence in company – not with her husband, but with other, safer, men, who are less distractingly handsome and charming. She becomes a success. And Lord Astor gradually realises that a wife can\u2019t simply be ignored. She\u2019s a real person with real feelings, and he begins to care about those feelings, just a little. The way they both change, little by little over many chapters, is one of the joys of the book, beautifully evoked by Balogh. We see it happen because we\u2019re privy to both characters\u2019 thoughts all the way through. And when the crisis comes and Arabella finds out about the mistress, we know their thoughts on that, too, and follow every step of their journey to understanding each other.<\/p>\n

Some reviewers have compared this book to some of Georgette Heyer\u2019s works, in particular A Civil Contract or The Convenient Marriage, and although there are similarities, the book that I\u2019m most reminded of is another Balogh one, Dancing With Clara. In that, the marriage is just as cold-blooded an arrangement, between a dissolute rake and gambler who\u2019s wasted his fortune, and a wealthy heiress who is wheelchair bound. It suits them both – he gets her money, and she gets a virile young man as her husband. But that story had a realistic resolution which was (for me, anyway) deeply unsatisfying. The Obedient Bride has a much more positive ending, perhaps less realistic, but much more in keeping with the expectations of romance readers. This isn\u2019t an easy read, but it is a deeply rewarding one, and I commend it to anyone looking for a clear-eyed deconstruction of a marriage of convenience. Five stars.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mary Balogh is a brilliant writer and one of her greatest talents is to create a unique situation for her characters and then let that work itself out in the most logical and not always the easiest way. This is a marriage of convenience story, but it looks with uncompromising honesty at what a great […]<\/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":[63],"class_list":["post-4039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review","tag-balogh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4039","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=4039"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4039\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4043,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4039\/revisions\/4043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}