Up All Night with a Good Duke (The Byronic Book Club, 1)
Artemis Jones leaves her schoolteacher position to return to 1858 London to help her friend Lucy through the tortures of the Season. A self-declared bluestocking, Artemis plans to start a ladies’ college and so decides to free herself of her aunt’s insistence she marry by staging her ruination with the help of the Dastardly Duke of Dartmoor, Dominic Winters, who in return enlists Artemis’s guidance of his tempestuous daughter. When the delicious duke instead offers marriage, Artemis plays along in hopes of finding prospective patrons for her college, while hiding her authorship of the salacious Gothic novels that the duke deplores. When her villainous former suitor ruins her sister and endangers Dominic’s life, Artemis realizes she must confess to all before a scheming governess ruins her reputation for real.
Fortunately, love and good sense win in the end. Bennett breathes enough life into familiar characters to make them endearing and the shout-outs to contemporary literature—Jane Austen, Jane Eyre, Mary Wollstonecraft—support Artemis’s bluestocking cred. Likely only true lovers of the Victorian Gothic will feel the book’s lack of spooky frisson is a missed opportunity. Dominic is a mature, perceptive, and self-aware man who fills out a waistcoat, Artemis is frank about her desires, and the emotional arc is complete while the action entertains. This romance hits all the right notes.
