![\"\"](\"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/olivia-225x300.jpg\")
Not a perfect book by any means. The heroine is not very likeable, the hero is all over the place, and the supporting characters are largely useless, but there was something about it that got under my skin, and by the end I felt deeply sorry for the heroine.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the premise: Olivia Fenwick doesn\u2019t get on with her new stepmother, so she\u2019s taken a year away from home to act as governess\/companion to the daughter of a distant but high-ranking relation. With the daughter safely wed, she decides to continue her successful career, but this time she\u2019ll market herself as a very superior type of governess, more a family guest than an employee, although charging a phenomenal rate for her services. She settles for a baron\u2019s family, with two daughters, and at first everything goes swimmingly. Only Lady Synge\u2019s brother, Lord Philmot, seems unimpressed by Olivia\u2019s abilities, taking every opportunity to denigrate her.<\/p>\n
But gradually things start to go wrong, and Olivia finds herself in very difficult circumstances, not entirely of her own making. I said that she\u2019s not very likeable – she\u2019s arrogant, intolerant, a raging snob and has no self-awareness. Even so, I did actually admire her independence of spirit and was very sorry when everything started to fall apart for her. The hero – well, he veers about from outright antagonism to a kind of heavy-duty flirtation, and sometimes it\u2019s hard to know what to make of him. That\u2019s not helped by the first person narration from Olivia\u2019s point of view, so we only ever see Lord Philmot through her eyes and she\u2019s not the most perceptive person in the world. To be honest, I was quite prepared to dislike him quite thoroughly, since he not only has a mistress in tow for the early part of the book, he tries it on with Olivia, too, and then effectively punishes her when she won\u2019t play the game. But he can be very charming when he wants to be, and he does eventually set things right for Olivia (which he should have done, since most of her problems were his fault).<\/p>\n
One of the interesting points in the book is the contrast between the aristocracy, who vary from selfish to outright wicked, and the middle classes. Olivia reveres the nobility, and just can\u2019t see when they\u2019re being horrible. Her now-married former charge, for instance, who cold-bloodedly excludes Olivia from all her social events, which Olivia sets down to forgetfulness or her new husband\u2019s influence. Even when Olivia overhears her talking about \u2018a bossy old scold\u2019, she doesn\u2019t for one minute imagine it\u2019s herself being spoken of. It\u2019s quite sad, actually.<\/p>\n
But her middle class relations in Hans Town are a lovely, normal family who welcome Olivia with genuine friendliness, and her own family in Bath are equally lovely, setting off for London instantly when they hear what has happened to her, to make sure things are set right. And Olivia is by this time so humbled by her experiences that she finds that her stepmother is perfectly tolerable, in fact. Slightly vulgar, but good-hearted and not at all the enemy she\u2019d imagined.<\/p>\n
And the hero eventually becomes suitably heroic, and the book wraps up in the annoying way of books of this age with an abrupt kiss and that\u2019s it. Anyone looking for a schmaltzy extended epilogue – sorry, not happening. This was a bit uneven, and there are a few Americanisms, but in the end I enjoyed it enough to give it four stars.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Not a perfect book by any means. The heroine is not very likeable, the hero is all over the place, and the supporting characters are largely useless, but there was something about it that got under my skin, and by the end I felt deeply sorry for the heroine. Here\u2019s the premise: Olivia Fenwick doesn\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[37],"class_list":["post-5457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review","tag-smith"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5457","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=5457"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5461,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5457\/revisions\/5461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}