Try Before You Trust: To All Gentlewomen and Other Maids in Love
London in the early autumn of 1567, and Isabella Whitney, aged 18, arrives at the substantial London home of the widowed Lady Bramwell. As a gentlewoman herself, she is to work there for a year as a general maidservant, the intention being to learn the skills necessary to allow her to take up an influential role in a large house. Isabella’s personal priority, however, is to gain access to Bramwell House’s library, as she has a passion for books and learning. Lady Bramwell’s favourite nephew, Robert Barrington, makes himself known to Isabella. It is a familiar tale of (male) perfidy and society’s double standards and expectations of what a genteel female should be and do, which is certainly not to write and desire to have published poetry in a patriarchal society that generally treats women as third-class members.
This is a fictionalised biography, as Isabella existed and was indeed a writer, but very little is known about her life. Constance Briones has woven a background and invented many characters and events to fill in the gaps and conceptualise her writing life. The context is historically authentic and very well researched. But the dialogue and delivery are rather wooden and remind me a little of the flat, mock-archaic historical fiction conversations of Walter Scott or William Harrison Ainsworth. There are also a few proofing errors, and just to note that a British speaker would not refer to the ground floor in a building as the “first floor.” Briones also needs to keep the tenses consistent within sentences and paragraphs as they vary between past and present. Overall though, this is good historical fiction that sends the reader back to the life, culture and milieu of 16th-century London.
