Pride Comes Before a Fall
Leopold Sloane needs a chaperone for his headstrong sisters, and although other candidates have more experience, he is impressed by Portia Kendall’s superior training as a governess and her convincing arguments during the interview. That she is young and pretty has, of course, no influence on his decision.
The complication is that she is a crusading political reformer whose scathing articles condemn aristocratic privilege and the misuse of power, and he is the Duke of Debden and a local magistrate.
Since this is a Regency romance, readers expect the protagonists to fall in love, learn from their mistakes and marry, despite the daunting difference in class and political beliefs, and the author fulfils these expectations brilliantly. The irony is incisive; the humor entertaining; the heroine an independent-minded delight; the hero “not quite the aristocratic villain that she had been keen to paint him” but “a decent man…trying to do his best under the most challenging circumstances”; his family unexpectedly enlightened and supportive; the villains despicably arrogant and abusive.
What really stands out, however, is the description of how those in authority abuse power (more detailed than is usual in a romance), and Portia’s ringing denunciation is worthy of her Shakespearian namesake: “Can you not see that every single bit of that was wrong? From the overreaction to the protest to the arbitrary arrests by the authorities, to your blue-blooded sister’s release without charge to the constable’s bloody lies to charge me for her offenses… heaven forbid that I expect the basic courtesy of either the benefit of the doubt or a fair trial in a country that is so unjust, unequal, and institutionally unfair to people—like me—who do not matter.” Words that resonate now more powerfully than ever. Highly recommended.
