Georgette Heyer is - and has been for decades - my favourite ‘comfort’ reading. It would be easy for me to read my way through all her Regency Romance books in a year… but I prefer to space them out, so as to give a gap of at least eight or nine years between each re-read of any book. I’ve just finished ‘The Reluctant Widow’, a book I’ve read at least six times before. The last time was towards the end of 2011, and I’d forgotten quite a bit of the plot.
The basic outline - which I recalled - is that a young woman is prevailed on to marry a young man who is dying, for the sake of his relatives. And then she’s caught up in a series of increasingly bizarre events. Sure enough, the opening chapter introduces us to Elinor Rochdale, a young woman in her mid-twenties, who is on her way to take up a post as governess. Her employer is somewhat formidable, but has promised to send someone to meet the stagecoach.
So when a groom approaches her, and asks if she is the young lady who answered the advertisement, she replies that she is. She’s too tired to check that she’s in the right place - but there are no other carriages, and nobody else alighted with her. So it’s reasonable to assume that this carriage has come to meet her. And she’s pleasantly surprised that it’s comfortable, though a little puzzled at how far it seems to be going.
When she meets Lord Carlyon, there’s a bit of cross-communication before the mistake is discovered. When he proposes that she would suit his advert - for a young woman to embark on a marriage of convenience with his young and very wild cousin - she refuses, and he accepts that. But then events take a dramatic turn, Carlyon’s younger brother Nicky has been involved in a fight - and Elinor is so tired that she is persuaded to do what she is asked, albeit with extreme reluctance.
Elinor and Carlyon have an almost immediate rapport; he seems to stay calm no matter what she says, and they share a sense of humour - although over the next days she becomes more and more agitated and upset at the events that transpire. Promised a peaceful existence, putting a neglected house to rights, she confronts a house-breaker, is told that there’s a secret entrance to the house, and tries to find documents stolen by an agent who works for Bonaparte. She also sustains a nasty head injury.
It’s one of the more exciting Heyer novels, and while I remembered several scenes, and the eventual outcome, there were a great many details that I had forgotten. The inevitable romance is very low-key, only exposed on the last few pages, but the story is full of humour alongside some quite serious issues, including treachery and murder. Carlyon’s brother Nicky is an enthusiastic young man, convinced Elinor must love the excitement of trying to track down criminals. And the creepy hypochondriac Francis Cheviot is a wonderful creation - and I had not remembered at all what the eventual outcome was, or what his role was in the plot about treachery.
All in all, I liked re-reading this very much, and look forward already to reading it again in another decade or so. 'The Reluctant Widow' is available new in paperback, ebook or audio form, and often found in charity shops and other secondhand bookshops.
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