An Unlikely Proposition (Unexpected Seasons, 2)
1818. Despite last year’s discouraging experience, Thalia Aubrey remains determined to return to London hoping to find a publisher for her poems, and she is delighted when her application for a position as companion to a widow is accepted. Eleanor Lockhart is much younger than she expects, however, and soon the lives of these two inexperienced young women become complicated. Will Thalia manage to deal with sexist attitudes and a devious brother? Will the plots of the nephew of Eleanor’s late husband to steal her inheritance succeed? And will they negotiate their romantic entanglements?
The plot teeters close to farce: Thalia is attracted to Henry Salisbury; he shares the attraction, but he has agreed to a false engagement to Eleanor, who hopes it will relieve her from the nephew’s pressure. For her part, Eleanor is attracted to Owen Jones, who is considered her social inferior; he turns out to be the brother of the actress whom Thalia’s brother tries to rescue from the harassment of none other than Eleanor’s husband’s nephew.
The warning against self-centred men who prey upon vulnerable women is as applicable today as during the Regency era, but the melodrama is distracting.
