A Lady’s Guide to Fortune-Hunting
After both her parents die, leaving crushing debts, and then her intended breaks their engagement, Kitty Talbot needs to find another wealthy husband if she is to provide for her four younger sisters. Since she is a realist, known for ‘her quick mind and talent for practical problem-solving’, she sets off for London, where prospects surely abound. She soon finds a promising candidate, but when his older brother intervenes, she agrees to leave young Archie alone in return for Lord Radcliffe’s assistance to find a replacement.
Fortune-hunters are rarely viewed sympathetically in Regency romances (remember Lucy Steele in Sense and Sensibility?), but Irwin takes on the task with impressive results and an ironic finesse of which Jane Austen would surely have approved. On the one hand, Kitty’s adversaries are a self-centred bunch of snobbish society matrons and their foolish sons, convinced male privilege and double standards are their right. On the other, her motives are defensible, her skill and initiative admirable (as Radcliffe comes to appreciate), and she grows as a character, learning to pay attention to the needs of others and even help when it is against her own best interests. She is a heroic figure.
Highly recommended.
