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Nov. 24th, 2024 09:29 amI've been meaning for months to write about a couple of Evie Dunmore romance novels, Bringing Down the Duke and Portrait of a Scotsman, which I read because my sister-in-law pushed them into my hands and said "you MUST bring these to Scotland! they are extremely silly but also the perfect vacation reads for reading In Scotland!"
I did not actually end up bringing them to read In Scotland, because they are large paperbacks and I was trying to allow myself luggage space to buy large paperbacks back from Scotland rather than lugging them to, but I read them on a later summer vacation so I could hand them back to my sister-in-law with a clear conscience. They are indeed very silly! I did not much like the first one but had a genuinely good time with the second, and also found them both sort of anthropologically fascinating as examples of how The Modern Historical Romance threads the needle of catering to all the particular reliable book-selling historical romance tropes with one hand while with the other continually assuring the reader that they are reading a Good and Feminist Book With Socially Progressive Mores, Do Not Worry About It.
These books are Victorian-era, and the connective tissue between them is that all the heroines are in a suffragette society Campaigning for the Women's Vote, and each of them will of course end up paired up with a very wealthy and probably aristocratic man who can support the cause! huzzah!!
In Bringing Down the Duke, our heroine Annabelle is a Cinderella figure who has gotten a suffragette scholarship to attend Oxford despite her family's unwillingness to waste money on sending her and also lose out on her free labor. At the beginning of the book she assures her relatives that she will somehow find the cash to pay for the salary of her replacement if they allow her to go, and then spends a couple pages stressing about that, which led me foolishly to believe that economics were going to be a major concern of the text. This of course was very silly of me as she almost immediately ends up in the Duke's house, where she spends most of the middle of the book convalescing from a convenient illness and having fantastic sex, and we never worry about this again.
Why is she in the Duke's house? uhhh they're trying to recruit him for the suffragette cause despite his reputation as a misanthropic Tory. Why is the Duke a misanthropic Tory? uhhhh he wants to buy back all his ancestral lands and he is profoundly wounded by the fact that a couple of them are still missing from the collection. The book takes this very seriously as an understandable cause of grief and it's presented as a serious sacrifice at the end when he gives up on His Ancestral Lands in order to support the Feminist Cause. huzzah! Feminism!! But, you know, it's True Love and he's not actively the WORST man in the world, so, fine. At one point Annabelle receives a proposal from a very nice professor to marry him in name only so she can go with him to pursue her dream research abroad -- at this point her only other option on-hand is being the Duke's Secret Mistress because he Cannot Marry Her, for Ancestral Land Reasons -- and it is so funny how the book does not even feel the need to try and make this research marriage of convenience proposition sound unappealing. This is not a St. John situation, everything about this seems like a great deal for her, but the Rules of the Feminist Historical Romance say she has to end up with the sexy duke and that, eventually, she WILL end up with the sexy duke, AND they will be married, AND she will still get to study at Oxford and be a member of the suffragette society, so why should we waste page space on anything else? And obviously it works, this book has sold Five Million Bazillion Copies. The tropes aren't my tropes but no one can say the balancing act is not performed to absolute perfection.
Portrait of a Scotsman is more fun for me because it is tropes I like -- the heroine in this one is the cheerfully artistic daughter of a big merchant family, and the hero is a dour Scots billionaire who rose from poverty and has ever since been gleefully using his financial leverage to trampling abusive aristocrats under his vengeful heel, and he ends up manipulating her into a marriage of convenience for reasons I don't remember.
THE BOOK: but is it ETHICAL to trample aristocrats under a vengeful financial heel? Does it perhaps make this man evil?
ME: well, no, but being a billionaire in and of itself migh makes him evil --
THE BOOK: no, no, I promise he's an ethical billionaire. He buys up impoverished coal mining towns in Scotland that are being abused by their aristocratic owners, which he knows about because he grew up in a coal mining town that was being abused by its aristocratic owners and experienced all these evils firsthand, and turns them into collectivist enterprises! power to the workers!
ME: okay great! thank you for ensuring that your billionaire hero is the world's MOST ethical billionaire. this is very very funny but I do appreciate it
THE BOOK: wait but does trampling aristocrats under his vengeful heel perhaps make him evil
ME: no I don't think so
Meanwhile the heroine bonds with the coal mining town inhabitants and decides that she's getting nowhere with this painting business, she's only middling at it and has nothing new to say with it, so instead she's going to channel her artistic talents into learning about PHOTOGRAPHY and pioneer PHOTOGRAPHIC EXHIBITS FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE. god bless!!
(I did keep expecting an explicit reveal that our heroine was Jewish -- her name is Hattie Greenfield, she comes from a large multinational merchant family with links to iirc the Ephrussi or some other famous real-world historical Jewish banking family, she's notably red-headed, there's an offhand reference to a grandparent having 'converted' to Anglicanism but it doesn't specify from what? Evie Dunmore I'm not sure why all this coding without actually saying it, what are you so nervous about?)
I did not actually end up bringing them to read In Scotland, because they are large paperbacks and I was trying to allow myself luggage space to buy large paperbacks back from Scotland rather than lugging them to, but I read them on a later summer vacation so I could hand them back to my sister-in-law with a clear conscience. They are indeed very silly! I did not much like the first one but had a genuinely good time with the second, and also found them both sort of anthropologically fascinating as examples of how The Modern Historical Romance threads the needle of catering to all the particular reliable book-selling historical romance tropes with one hand while with the other continually assuring the reader that they are reading a Good and Feminist Book With Socially Progressive Mores, Do Not Worry About It.
These books are Victorian-era, and the connective tissue between them is that all the heroines are in a suffragette society Campaigning for the Women's Vote, and each of them will of course end up paired up with a very wealthy and probably aristocratic man who can support the cause! huzzah!!
In Bringing Down the Duke, our heroine Annabelle is a Cinderella figure who has gotten a suffragette scholarship to attend Oxford despite her family's unwillingness to waste money on sending her and also lose out on her free labor. At the beginning of the book she assures her relatives that she will somehow find the cash to pay for the salary of her replacement if they allow her to go, and then spends a couple pages stressing about that, which led me foolishly to believe that economics were going to be a major concern of the text. This of course was very silly of me as she almost immediately ends up in the Duke's house, where she spends most of the middle of the book convalescing from a convenient illness and having fantastic sex, and we never worry about this again.
Why is she in the Duke's house? uhhh they're trying to recruit him for the suffragette cause despite his reputation as a misanthropic Tory. Why is the Duke a misanthropic Tory? uhhhh he wants to buy back all his ancestral lands and he is profoundly wounded by the fact that a couple of them are still missing from the collection. The book takes this very seriously as an understandable cause of grief and it's presented as a serious sacrifice at the end when he gives up on His Ancestral Lands in order to support the Feminist Cause. huzzah! Feminism!! But, you know, it's True Love and he's not actively the WORST man in the world, so, fine. At one point Annabelle receives a proposal from a very nice professor to marry him in name only so she can go with him to pursue her dream research abroad -- at this point her only other option on-hand is being the Duke's Secret Mistress because he Cannot Marry Her, for Ancestral Land Reasons -- and it is so funny how the book does not even feel the need to try and make this research marriage of convenience proposition sound unappealing. This is not a St. John situation, everything about this seems like a great deal for her, but the Rules of the Feminist Historical Romance say she has to end up with the sexy duke and that, eventually, she WILL end up with the sexy duke, AND they will be married, AND she will still get to study at Oxford and be a member of the suffragette society, so why should we waste page space on anything else? And obviously it works, this book has sold Five Million Bazillion Copies. The tropes aren't my tropes but no one can say the balancing act is not performed to absolute perfection.
Portrait of a Scotsman is more fun for me because it is tropes I like -- the heroine in this one is the cheerfully artistic daughter of a big merchant family, and the hero is a dour Scots billionaire who rose from poverty and has ever since been gleefully using his financial leverage to trampling abusive aristocrats under his vengeful heel, and he ends up manipulating her into a marriage of convenience for reasons I don't remember.
THE BOOK: but is it ETHICAL to trample aristocrats under a vengeful financial heel? Does it perhaps make this man evil?
ME: well, no, but being a billionaire in and of itself migh makes him evil --
THE BOOK: no, no, I promise he's an ethical billionaire. He buys up impoverished coal mining towns in Scotland that are being abused by their aristocratic owners, which he knows about because he grew up in a coal mining town that was being abused by its aristocratic owners and experienced all these evils firsthand, and turns them into collectivist enterprises! power to the workers!
ME: okay great! thank you for ensuring that your billionaire hero is the world's MOST ethical billionaire. this is very very funny but I do appreciate it
THE BOOK: wait but does trampling aristocrats under his vengeful heel perhaps make him evil
ME: no I don't think so
Meanwhile the heroine bonds with the coal mining town inhabitants and decides that she's getting nowhere with this painting business, she's only middling at it and has nothing new to say with it, so instead she's going to channel her artistic talents into learning about PHOTOGRAPHY and pioneer PHOTOGRAPHIC EXHIBITS FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE. god bless!!
(I did keep expecting an explicit reveal that our heroine was Jewish -- her name is Hattie Greenfield, she comes from a large multinational merchant family with links to iirc the Ephrussi or some other famous real-world historical Jewish banking family, she's notably red-headed, there's an offhand reference to a grandparent having 'converted' to Anglicanism but it doesn't specify from what? Evie Dunmore I'm not sure why all this coding without actually saying it, what are you so nervous about?)
