Book Review: Shadow of a Lady
Author: Jane Aiken Hodges
Date: 1973
Publisher: Coward McCann & Geoghegan
ISBN: none
Length: 312 pages
Quote: “Helen might well have grown up in a state of ignorance worthy of a Rousseau heroine, if the vicar’s sister had not intervened.”
Helen, who thinks for herself enough to read such shocking stuff as Tom Jones and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, admires that scandalous woman who becomes Lady Hamilton, and grows up to achieve a love life of her own that would be equally gossip-worthy if people didn’t conspire to help her keep it all hushed up. Her husband prefers male bedmates but manages to give Helen a son, and she manages not to flop into bed with her True Love before she’s free to marry him.
Set close enough to the “Regency Period” of English history to entice readers of “Regency Romances” onto new ground, Shadow of a Lady moves its central characters to Italy, where they’re closer to less familiar historical details, and plenty of them: political intrigues, naval battles, erupting volcanoes. Some things remain constant. Men wear knee breeches; women wear flimsy “Grecian” gowns. Everyone worries about Napoleon. Letters take months to arrive, if they arrive. Sexual ethics has a double standard—low for both sexes. Soldiers get cannonball wounds. Husbands crave male heirs. Readers, however, get to meet a different royal family.
By and large the adventures are tastefully narrated. Feelings are expressed more by meaningful looks and things left unsaid than by explicit details. The word “rape” is used (it happens to Helen) but Hodges assumes that readers who need to know how this crime is committed already do. Adults will know exactly why Helen doesn’t want her son to spend much time with Price and Merritt, but children are free to imagine that she thinks they’ll teach the boy picturesque eighteenth-century swearwords. There aren’t even a lot of swearwords in this book.
If you’re a person who generally doesn’t care for novels about adults, this one won’t win you over, but people who like Regency Romances like Shadow of a Lady.
No comments:
Post a Comment