Book Review: A Lady's Proposal

A Fair Trade Book, I Think

Title: A Lady's Proposal

Author: Jeanne Savery

Date: 1998

Publisher: Kensington

ISBN: 0-8217-5992-2

Length: 252 pages

Quote: “Actually, her beauty had been her bane for...something near a decade...ever since age sixteen when Lady Hel's beauty burst forth much as a rose opens overnight.”

Lady Helena Woodhall is an interesting fictional confection: a child of the 1990s living in a rather flimsy mock-up of the 1790s. She likes Simon, Earl of Sanger, and he likes her, but she has more money than he has...and in their version of Regency England, that money is hers, not assigned to a male “guardian” until it's automatically transferred to her husband upon her marriage. Lady Hel also climbs walls and crawls through tunnels, completely unimpeded by the flimsy gowns and drapey shawls that looked so “elegant” and “romantic” because they positively shrieked “Wearer does not do any work, or even go outdoors.” She doesn't believe in any of the superstitions that dominated her era, and she can take a bullet, as the contemporary expression was, “like a man.”

She is in danger, and hopes to obtain protection from marriage, but obviously nobody has ever succeeded in persuading Lady Hel that men don't feel a need to protect a woman who they suspect can kill her own snakes. In a proper “Regency romance,” the boy rescues the girl. In this one, Lady Hel does respect the rules enough to faint in Lord Sanger's arms, and technically the murderer dies by misadventure, but we all know Lady Hel kills her own snakes. Sanger marries her anyway.

You knew, of course, that they'd be married, because this is a Romance. You knew that their courtship would be cute and comedic (Lady Hel is not a sweet heroine) rather than earthy and physical, because it's a Regency Romance. No rule of the genre would keep the identity and motives of Lady Hel's enemy a matter of suspense, but Lady Hel knows the answer to those questions, and so do readers.

The best thing to be said for Regency Romances is that they convince us that characters are “in love” without dragging us through the details of every smooch. The turn of the nineteenth century was a period when the English admired wittiness, and although in practice most of them preferred women who smiled at men's wisecracks rather than wisecracking in their own right, even a real Regency Romance (the genre, of course, being inspired by Jane Austen) requires couples to flirt wittily rather than flop into bed.

Historically this novel is about as credible as that 1978 nightgown (the drape of brushed acetate tricot, not linen gauze) and 1998 makeup job Lady Hel is modelling on the front cover. Still, she's pretty; the story's pretty. Does a contemporary story that gives pleasure need to be historically sound? Say it takes place in an alternate universe, somewhere on the Lost Planet of Nice, and enjoy it in peace.

Jeanne Savery appears to be alive, though not active in cyberspace, so this is A Fair Trade Book. If you buy it here, $5 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment, for a total of $10 or $11, we'll send $1 to Savery or a charity of her choice. At least seven more books of this size will fit into a package along with this one, and, if able to locate living writers and/or identify their charities for all seven, the package would cost $45, of which we'd send $8 to the writer(s) and her/their charity/ies.