This book blew me away. I would give it more than five stars if possible! I bought it on a whim, read the first page, and then neglected home and hearth to finish it. The writing is of astonishingly high quality - if you are a fan of Georgette Heyer, this is the quality of work you are about to read. It is excellent.
The premise of the book: Mattie, a late-20s spinster, lives with her dreadful miser of an uncle in a dreadful house in a dreadful winter landscape, trapped by her poverty, her gender, and her unmarried state. She relies on her Scroogeish uncle for everything, her clothes, her food, shelter. It is unlikely that her station in life will suddenly change because of marriage, as Mattie is a large lady, both tall and voluptuous, and plain to boot. Her personality is not such that she dwells on this overmuch: Mattie understands clearly her current situation and likely future, and she gets on with the business of living with as much cheer as she can muster. But Mattie has a plan. She's penning an erotic memoir, made up wholesale, using an illicit copy of Fanny Hill to give her ideas her inexperienced self otherwise would of course not have.
The miserable winter is interrupted when a friend of her late cousin (who fought and died at Waterloo, leaving her miserly uncle heirless), Edward Kane, comes to visit. Kane is enormous, and heavily scarred, and has what we would now call PTSD from his experiences in the war, and he suffers deep guilt over his dead friend's fate. He is a stern man, not especially handsome or charming or smooth with women. But he is kind, and honorable, and the writing in his POV chapters is so good that you will soon feel great affection for Edward.
Mattie lacks the information to finish the critical first chapter of her fake memoir: what exactly is it like to make love for the first time, to lose your virginity to a man? And she must finish the chapter if she's to get paid for the memoir, and she must have that money if she's to complete her plan and escape her uncle's home to run her own boarding house. After she and Edward have formed a tenuous friendship, she asks him to lie with her, and the story flows as you might expect from there, but in the most well-done way possible.
The book is also very, very funny, in a low-key Heyer kind of way. The miserly uncle demands perfect silence during meals (for the benefit of their digestion), and dinner is nothing but boiled food. He commands the cook to skimp on butter, so the shortcake served with tea is inedibly dry. Mattie is forced to burn tallow candles in her bedroom, so moments of sensual tenderness are unfortunately marred by the scent of mutton fat. After dinner, Mattie reads aloud from sermons intended to improve the general tone of a young lady's mind.
This book really surprised me. The writing is so good and so period-appropriate, and the characters were so detailed and so real, both their trials and their falling in love were very emotionally compelling to me. I also loved that the book centered on less-lofty characters and settings than is commonly the case in Regency romances: Edward Kane is a plain Mr., a younger son, a scarred ex-soldier. Mattie is not particularly lovely in the eyes of most, but she is bright and thoughtful and determined to make a better life for herself than her era generally grants unmarried women with no money of their own. And I loved the unusual setting of a freezing-cold country home in winter, instead of the usual sparkling London season. It made Mattie's plight all the more real, and made me want something else for her all the more.
Highly recommended! I hope to see more from this author.
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