Title: American Heiress

(Here's what Blogspot was meant to have posted for the fourth of May.)

Title: American Heiress

Author: Daisy Goodwin

Original (UK) title: My Last Duchess

Publisher (US): St Martin’s Press

Date: 2010

ISBN: 978-0-312-65865-6

Length: 465 pages plus book group discussion guide

Quote: “The whole of America knows you are going to europe,t of ind a suitable consort for the Cash millions.”

Cora Cash would rather stay in the States and marry her long-term boyfriend, but he’s afraid people will despise them and think he married her for money alone. So, after disgracing herself by kissing the man to whom she would like to become engaged and having him step back, she goes to England and marries Ivo, the Duke of Wareham. But can he really love her? Can she really love him? Has she done anything but sell her body for a title?

Daisy Goodwin’s answers to these questions might fit into a Harlequin Romance, but in an effort to give this novel a little Social Relevance Goodwin gives Cora a maid, Bertha, who also marries an Englishman. Bertha has a light complexion for someone who identifies as Black. In England she’s still mostly overlooked, but for her social status as a maid rather than her alleged color, and in no time at all a nice fellow domestic called Jim is calling her his “black pearl.” Bertha’s plans for an independent life involve a little discreet theft but also a lot of honest extra work and scrimping and saving, so, arguably, she deserves to make this novel a double romance, especially after the humiliation of confessing some of her petty larceny.

Anyway it’s a nice thick double romance with a touch of trendy interracial sex and lots of historical details about the manners and styles of the 1890s, a period many people enjoy reading about more than I do. There’s a little more sex than I would like a child to catch me reading in a novel, but it’s not more explicit or likely to traumatize a child than I would like a child to discover in a nonfiction book, so reader discretion is all that can be advised. People who usually enjoy romances are likely to enjoy this one more than I did.