2025 Victorian romance. Miles Quincey, a crusading newspaper editor,
has been looking too hard into the Academy, so its deputy
headmistress, Nell Trewlove, is sent to fob him off. An incident with
a cat caught in her crinoline, and an accidental witness ready to
believe the worst, leaves her fatally compromised, and all she can do
is marry Miles…
One of the unspoken tensions for a modern romance author must be
that there's a significant fraction of the audience that wants her
swooning into his manly arms, and his money and power and so on will
solve all her problems. But, well, it's not 1950. And this series in
particular is anchored on an admittedly anachronistic school for
orphaned girls that makes a point of equipping them to defend
themselves by all means available.
So while Nell is at first very reluctant, she's persuaded into the
marriage for the reputation of the school; and at first she means only
to mark time until her reputation has recovered enough to return to
teaching, and even by the end she hasn't ruled out doing so. What she
forms with Miles, once he gets to the point of being able to accept
it, is a true partnership: they will both do things, they will play to
their strengths, and neither of them will give up the things they love
that aren't part of the standard marriage recipe.
There's also the matter of a missing reporter who left behind some
cryptic notes, and various others who may or may not have come to Bad
Ends. Of course a Proper Wife shouldn't be rooting through the
brothels of Whitechapel, but it's not as though there's any way to
stop her, and she gets results…
I read romances for the characters, and I can believe both in these
characters and in their affection for each other. And they stay true
to themselves.