Never Less Than a Lady

These are the types of pictures I've been coloring.

I have taken time off from reading for the past couple of months. I seemed to need coloring and jigsaw puzzles. My right brain must have been feeling deprived. But with a spread of books in front of me and the longer hours of daylight, my inner reader is up and kicking. In the past week or so, I've been feeling restless with the visual and recognized a yearning for text. Here's what happened.

The blogger singing
earnestly at the St.
Patrick's show.

Last Saturday, I performed in a St. Patrick's Day revue at the dearly-loved Herbert Wescoat Memorial (Vinton County) Library. The show was totally fun and wacky--singing, dancing, skits, sketches, recitations on an Irish theme. The cast ended up using community room as the "green room" and it was full of the remains of the quarterly book sale. The tables were piled with every genre of fiction, from dull classics to racy paperbacks. And they said to us, "the more books you take, the fewer we have to pack up tonight." A medium-sized boxful of books later, I was eager to sit down and read my heart out.

This is a long way to say that I just finished a book that I plucked from the book sale on the night of the St. Patrick's Day celebration. It was a regency romance by Mary Jo Putney called Never Less Than a Lady. And it was everything a regency romance should be--funny, wry, sweet, sexy, and star-crossed. All regencies are pretty much the same.

• Man meets woman.
• Man and woman hate each other.
• Hate is really fear of attraction.
• Man and woman declare love and have marriage and sex (or sex and marriage, depending on the author).
• Events separate man and woman.
• They get back together.
• The end.

All regencies have an element of Jane Austen about them--in the early nineteenth century settings, the importance of manners and appearances, and rigid gender roles to fight against or accept. In a sense, these books are developmental. The heroes and heroines start out with immature ideas of love and marriage and end up with a mature love. That's the pattern. But there's lots of fun along the way--disguises, danger, escapes, near misses. The gender roles are clear--woman is always protected and saved from peril by man; man is always missing some part of life and gets it from woman. This is the classic romance formula.

Regency covers range from
suggestive to racy to downright
sexual!

Never Less Than a Lady was good. A quick read. Brisk. Read it in one day. The heroine was living in disguise--everyone thought she was dead. The man helped her reclaim her life. a funny twist was that the heroine was a midwife. This was less key to the plot than anything else, a bit extraneous, but plausible in that it let the woman live on her own without suspicion. Another funny twist was the problem of who had the most money. Would the heroine still want to be married when she reclaimed her lost birthright? Would the man feel like he didn't need to save her anymore. A tempest in a teapot. I think both twists were attempts to modernize the content a bit, to increase its relevance to the modern woman.

No fear, though. The formula stands the test of time. And the romance makes more sense in the nineteenth century than modern romances do in the twenty-first. This romance was a great way to get back into the reading mode. Next up? Kathy Reich, the author of the Bones books.