By Julia Bennet, Pub Date 2/2/2023
3.5*s. Great Historical romance pick by an independent publisher!
PUBLISHER’S SYNOPSIS
“A defiant Victorian wife fights to escape a bad marriage but her love for a forbidden man jeopardizes her chance at freedom.
James Standish knows how to play society’s game. He’ll follow the rules, marry a virginal debutante, and inherit a massive fortune. At least, that’s the plan until he meets Francesca Thorne. She’s not the sort of woman a respectable gentleman like James could ever marry—not least because, strictly speaking, she’s married already.
Francesca is determined to flout convention and divorce her philandering husband. When James sweet talks his way into her life tasked with convincing her to abandon her dream of freedom, she’s unprepared for the passion that flares between them.
Torn apart by conflicting desires, James and Francesca must choose whether to keep chasing the lives they’ve always wanted or take a chance on a new and forbidden love.”
REVIEW
The Worst Woman in London follows two very interesting main characters. Francesca is a woman bent on escaping her marriage of roughly a decade to a spouse that has taken on many mistresses and doesn’t care to give her much of a glance since he found out that she wasn’t the naïve young woman he thought he needed to marry (this becomes a plot point later in the book). James is a respectable gentleman who must toe the line of polite society in order to inherit his aunt’s title and fortune.
When Francesca’s estranged husband requests that James meet with Francesca with an offer of a heavy allowance in exchange for her dropping her pursuit of divorce (strictly to stop embarrassing him, of course), James is surprised to find a woman with a backbone of iron unwilling to budge. She’s not at all the woman that his friend has been describing to him the last nine or so years as cold and unwelcoming. Instead, he sees a fire and passion that he finds quite intriguing, and he can’t quite blame her for her ire given that her husband not only has been keeping mistresses, but doing so in a very public and quite embarrassing way.
James is not the man that Francesca assumed, either. He seems to understand her predicament and her feelings. They form a sort of friendship that quickly leads to secret feelings. However, if Francesca is going to get all she wants from this divorce—her freedom and a possible ability to remarry if she so chose—she needs to avoid further scandal at all costs. James is in the same position. He knows that in order to inherit, he must be prepared to let his thoughts of Francesca go and do what is expected of him. Marry a respectable debutante who can sire an heir to his aunt’s fortune and title and eventually inherit it himself.
However, as James and Francesca’s friendship develops into something more, they both must question if the futures they had planned for themselves are really what they most desire or if what they truly need is each other.
I really enjoyed this one. It explored what divorced looked like back then, and how hard it was for a woman to obtain one when she was part of polite society. A man could absolutely flaunt his affairs in the face of society but even a whiff of scandal from a woman—true or false–and her entire reputation was in tatters. It is enough to boil my feminist blood to see how poorly women have been treated and disproportionately blamed for all of society’s ills when the majority had no true society-given power (but of course, it was also imposed on them by all other women in a self-feeding patriarchal societal system…), but I digress.
Applying our modern sensibilities to the less than well-aged parts of past society is what I like most about historical romance and is also why the feminist undercurrent of these books is so appealing. Watching women take back their power is a personal kink and if you agree with me, you’ll find this book to be one of the ones where the heroine is what we all aspire to be and the hero is just what we want.
Thank you Netgalley and Julia Bennet for the advanced ebook in exchange for this review.
Always Lost in Words 