Gwendolen

Lady Ortilia and Mr. Hugh Quarters have three daughters. When the story opens the first and third daughter are respectably engaged. The oldest, Gwendolen has contracted a marriage with a naval captain-- in large part because she admired Lord Nelson. The youngest is set to marry her childhood sweetheart. They have just learned that the middle daughter, Jane, the acknowledged Beauty, is about to receive a very advantageous offer from a gentleman she met during her Season in London, the Marquis of Lyndale, who is coming to ask her father's permission to pay his addresses to her. Mr. Quarters observed, "I've never held with marquisates. A jumped up sort of title. Earls and barons were good enough for us in the old days." Which would have done very well had Mr. Quarters stuck to this position, because Jane is in love with the impoverished but beautiful French emigre secretary of the Duke of Tardiff. However, Mr. Quarters is also a wastral, and very heavily indebted to the notorious moneylenders Messers Smith and Brown. Therefore even a Marquis with fifty thousand pounds a year is not to be whistled down the wind.Into this situation Lyndale arrives with a flash of carriage wheels, sending Gwendolen who happened to be strolling along the same narrow lane tumbling into a ditch to avoid being run down. This is symbolic of the way in which everyone's neat plans are overturned.Jane is such a dutiful thing that if not managed correctly she might accept the Marquis as a well of salvaging the family fortunes. Gwendolen discovers that her handsome heroic captain is really a pompous bore. Campaspe, the third daughter, in an effort to save Jane alienates her fiance. It hardly seems that all will come right in the end.The main problem with the book and the reason I would have given it 3 1/2 stars instead of 4 if it were possible, was that Ms. Darcy has a problem getting all of her lovers situated for the denouement. In fact the strategem is downright silly. However, there are enough fun moments in this book to make up for this.One of the things that I think might disturb readers used to recent Regency romances, is that the plot is not so much two people coming to understand they are in permanent ecstatic love, blah, blah, blah. The plot instead involves overcoming all of the obstacles: familial, financial and social that stand between two people coming to an understanding. Ms. Darcy is also really very knowledgeable about the Regency period, from the price of a post chaise to how bets were placed at a race, but her plots could have used a stronger editorial hand.