Sylvester by Georgette Heyer
I’m going to start off by going on a bit about a part of the plot that really annoyed me, but I actually liked this a lot!
This book starts off with our hero, Sylvester, planning to get married to a society girl who meets his expectations. His reason for wanting to get married is so that he can have his wife become a mother for his nephew. But! His nephew is not actually parentless! Sylvester’s widowed stepsister also lives with them, and he thinks that if he gives the kid a new mother, she’ll marry someone else and get out of his life!
So, uhm, yeah, the first 60~ pages of this book are about a man planning to get married so that he can make his wife be his nephew’s caretaker and force a mother to abandon her child. Objectively, I realize that he actually could have forcibly separated them, and is being more generous than many men of the times would have been, but this is one of those places where I can’t quite adjust my sensibilities enough.
However, his mother is duly concerned about his heartless approach to marriage, and so asks him to meet Phoebe, her best friend’s daughter, who she’s never met, but hopes that the mothers getting along means their children will, too. Except that Sylvester has met and possibly-unintentionally snubbed Phoebe by ignoring her when met again after dancing together at a ball, and then promptly forgetting her. And then she decided his looks were absolutely perfect for the villain in the gothic novel she was writing.
I adored Phoebe and her kind of mousy wit/cleverness from the start, and warmed up to Sylvester a lot after a while, and their scenes were very fun once they actually started communicating. I also thought the misunderstandings (both romantic and otherwise) were actually handled well for once, and loved pretty much everything related to Phoebe‘s book.
Also, I read the Harlequin reprint from a few years ago. The introduction annoyed me, and may have contributed to my initial sourness.
This book starts off with our hero, Sylvester, planning to get married to a society girl who meets his expectations. His reason for wanting to get married is so that he can have his wife become a mother for his nephew. But! His nephew is not actually parentless! Sylvester’s widowed stepsister also lives with them, and he thinks that if he gives the kid a new mother, she’ll marry someone else and get out of his life!
So, uhm, yeah, the first 60~ pages of this book are about a man planning to get married so that he can make his wife be his nephew’s caretaker and force a mother to abandon her child. Objectively, I realize that he actually could have forcibly separated them, and is being more generous than many men of the times would have been, but this is one of those places where I can’t quite adjust my sensibilities enough.
However, his mother is duly concerned about his heartless approach to marriage, and so asks him to meet Phoebe, her best friend’s daughter, who she’s never met, but hopes that the mothers getting along means their children will, too. Except that Sylvester has met and possibly-unintentionally snubbed Phoebe by ignoring her when met again after dancing together at a ball, and then promptly forgetting her. And then she decided his looks were absolutely perfect for the villain in the gothic novel she was writing.
I adored Phoebe and her kind of mousy wit/cleverness from the start, and warmed up to Sylvester a lot after a while, and their scenes were very fun once they actually started communicating. I also thought the misunderstandings (both romantic and otherwise) were actually handled well for once, and loved pretty much everything related to Phoebe‘s book.
Also, I read the Harlequin reprint from a few years ago. The introduction annoyed me, and may have contributed to my initial sourness.