Aubrey was certainly not intended as a hero, but in some inexplicable way I found myself falling in love with him almost as much as I was falling for Damarel. Aubrey is seventeen, wonderfully intelligent, entertainingly precocious, and rather touchy about the fact that he walks with a limp, due to a disease that affected his hip joint when he was younger. He enjoys the company of books more than he does most people – save Lord Damarel - and though he can be egotistical and unwittingly selfish, Aubrey will often surprise you by showing the depth of genuine feeling he has for his sister, which is truly touching. He's a difficult character to describe, but anyone who has read about him should understand my fondness for him. Beautiful, capable, and independent minded, Venetia Lanyon's life on her family's estate in the country side is somewhat restricted. But her neighbor, the infamous Lord Damerel, a charming rake shunned by polite society, is about to shake things up.

To satisfy the requirements of romantic fiction and to deliver wholly satisfactory adventure and romance, and to bring a complex and multifaceted era so sparklingly to life, to pay the reader the compliment of refusing to stint on the reality of the world she was escorting us to … this explains the enduring appeal of Georgette Heyer. Heyer cleverly puts all these people together, some we never even meet, some we only briefly meet and some we never expect to meet, yet they are all important to putting the final picture together. Then, in one extraordinary encounter, she meets a neighbour she only knew by reputation - the infamous Jasper Damerel. What a shame then that 25 year old Venetia lives a very reclusive life in Yorkshire. While her younger brother Sir Conway Lanyon lingers on the Continent with the Army, he has blithely placed all the estate responsibilities upon Venetia's capable shoulders. Tasked also with care of Aubrey, the youngest Lanyon offspring who is disabled, Venetia has all the confidence of the mistress of the household instead of that of a miss-ish girl fresh from the schoolroom.I absolutely love his sense of humor! I wish I had someone to trade Shakespearean insults with in everyday conversation... Good! What a fortunate escape you had, to be sure! I daresay it may not have occurred to you, but I have little doubt that by this time Lady Sophia has grown sadly fat. They do, you know, little plump women! Venetia Lanyon is twenty-five and lives in Yorkshire with her younger brother, Aubrey, who, at seventeen is already a prodigiously talented scholar. Their older brother is away in the army and assumed his father’s baronetcy upon the latter’s death a short time before the book begins. The children lost their mother shortly after Aubrey’s birth, and their reclusive father selfishly isolated his children as well as himself, so that neither Venetia nor Aubrey has much experience of society, and Venetia was never presented at court as was her due as the daughter of a member of the nobility. Georgette Heyer is also queen of the understated burn, and she is relentless here with the socially ambitious mushroom as well as the obliviously selfish. Mrs. Scorrier is a gem of awfulness that anyone who's ever been embroiled in a petty power struggle will surely relate to:

Single women—Fiction. 2. Country life—Fiction. 3. Family secrets—Fiction. 4. England—Fiction. I. Title. Chapter 5, in which it is noted that the Scoundrel is but hidden twin to the Good Man: each male contains both sides; the Sensible Woman is best served by accepting that reality. Master Aubrey’s hatred of his disability, and his passionate desire to show himself as hearty and as independent as his more fortunate contemporaries:You call me your friend, but I never called you mine, and never shall! You remained, and always will, a beautiful, desirable creature!’” News flash: I'm not 18 any more. So even though I still have a soft spot for romances in general and Regencies in particular, my appetite for reading about sweet, silly young girls who do brainless things and have Big Misunderstandings with the guy has dwindled to almost zero. When you're yelling "TALK TO EACH OTHER, PEOPLE" at a book, it's not particularly conducive to the romantic feelz. Her Georgian and Regencies romances were inspired by Jane Austen. While some critics thought her novels were too detailed, others considered the level of detail to be Heyer's greatest asset. When I start to mutter in French, it hints the book must've made an impression. And, dear me, this one did. How could it not? It's very intense for the average Heyer novel, a writer that normally shies away from overt sexiness as a scalded cat from water. A good timing it had, too, for I was on the edge of losing faith in this author's capacity to create masculine characters as interesting as Monseigneur and heroines that weren't behaving like stoopid ten-year-old schoolgirls at the ripe old age of, say, twenty.