1944 Regency romance. Needing to marry to gain his inheritance, and
refused by the Incomparable Isabella, the young buck Viscount
Sheringham plans to marry the first woman he sees. Fortunately this is
his childhood friend Hero Wantage, who's always worshipped him from
afar.
But the main tension of the book comes from them both being
idiots in different ways. Sherry has assumed that married life will be
much like bachelor life (dangerous driving, drinking, gambling) only
with a wife at home to help him entertain. Hero, whose guardian-cousin
regards her as largely an inconvenience in the way of her own
daughters' chances of a match, was being prepared for a life as a
governess or schoolroom drudge, and has no idea of how to spot or
avoid the social hazards of life in fashionable London. They will both
have rather a lot of growing-up to do, though in quite distinct
directions.
In effect this is a story of systemic failure: the various women who
should have been able to educate Hero (mother, guardian,
mother-in-law) are unable or unwilling to do so, so she ends up
copying Sherry, being perhaps so caught up in her liberation from
hard-working country life that she doesn't spot the vast gulf between
what gentlemen can get away with and what ladies can.
So there's a bit of a cycle of Hero innocently doing something that
turns out to be frightful, and Sherry having to rescue her reputation.
This could get quite tedious, but fortunately it's leavened by Sherry's
friends and the secondary plots. Gil and Ferdy are fellow young idiots
and relatively harmless, though thoroughly loyal and with a good sense
of what's fitting. Sir George Wrotham is so famed a duellist that he
can no longer let off tension by finding someone who'll stand up with
him, which doesn't help in his pursuit of the Incomparable Isabella.
And Sir Montagu Revesby is blatantly a Bad Man, which everyone can see
but Sherry.
The narrative focus is on the leads, certainly, but one of the things
I like about this book is that both the principals have other friends
and other social demands, and it feels to me like a romance that's
happening within a larger society, rather than playing out in
isolation against the theatrical backdrop.