Content warning: Heroine has history of torture, attempted rape, traumatic death of parents. None of this is described in detail, but it is there, and I do discuss it in the review

I picked up the ARC of A Lady’s Past purely based on the cover, which really is a thing of beauty, somewhere between impressionist and pre-Raphaelite. It is the fourth book in the Everton Domestic Society series, but it stands alone reasonably well. Having said that, I suspect that I would have liked the hero more if I’d read previous books in the series – the hero is clearly suffering from some Past Traumas which affect him, but they are alluded to fairly briefly here, and so it’s harder to forgive his more troubling behaviours.

This is a really tricky book to review, because while I enjoyed reading it and will be seeking out the previous books in the series, I found it very tonally dissonant. The emotions, words, and actions don’t match. In terms of plot and emotions, the book is full of the highest melodrama – the heroine’s backstory is extraordinarily traumatic, the hero is passionate and seems to be on a hair trigger for every emotion, and the story itself is rife with kidnapping attempts, threats of violence, and outright obsession and madness on the part of the villain. And yet, the overall feel of the book is very sweet and soothing – the hero, despite all the heightened emotion, is gentle and kind in all his actions, the story is populated with dozens of people who are eager to befriend and help the heroine, and there is a very pervasive atmosphere of calm and comfort in the book.

I have no idea how an author manages to write a story like this while maintaining such an air of calm and sweetness – I mean, that’s got to be some mad skills right there – but I found the contrast a bit jarring. Or I would have, if I hadn’t been lulled by the story’s tone. There are also some really incongruous word choices which pulled me up short.

Honestly, it’s very, very hard to express what an odd reading experience I found this.

But let’s backtrack and give you an idea of the story itself.

Jacques Laurent is on his way to London when he encounters a young woman with a shotgun on the road. Jacques is not a trusting soul – he is a French émigré, and he and his parents nearly lost their lives in the Terror due to, I think, the machinations of his ex-fiancée. However, the young woman, whose name is Diana, is clearly fleeing something dire, and he is intrigued by her courage and her situation, and so he offers to take her to London and to help her find somewhere safe to stay.

Diana is reluctant to accept his offer, because she fears putting others in danger, a fear which turns out to be pretty well-founded as the book progresses, but she is low on alternatives, and decides that accepting a ride to London will not compromise her safety or his. On the way, the weather forces them to spend the night at an inn where there is Only One Bed, because of course there is, and Jacques is very sweet about it (and for someone who is Definitely Never Going To Fall In Love Again, he is certainly falling for her like a ton of quite oblivious bricks). He persuades Diana to seek shelter with the Everton Domestic Society, an organisation that helps ladies find suitable and rewarding employment.

But Diana’s fears are well founded, and her past soon follows her to London, and much drama ensues.

I think I need to talk about Diana’s backstory a bit more, because it really is quite something. Here is Diana telling her story for the first time:

This is a lot, and one might reasonably expect Diana to be seriously traumatised by it.

And… she is, but she is also incredibly contained and stoic. The main emotions we see are her strong feelings of inadequacy and guilt, and her reluctance to let anyone close for fear that they might be harmed. Which makes sense – I would imagine that keeping her emotions on a tight leash was necessary to survive the things she has been through – but it bothered me that this never changed during the book. Perhaps I am projecting my own ideas of how trauma and recovery work onto Diana, but since romance is all about the emotional journey, I found it odd that the story sort of detoured around all of this trauma to have the love story. There is no moment of catharsis or emotional resolution for all of this, and at the end, Diana still feels sad and guilty about what happened to her parents, only now she feels guilty for feeling sad about it when she should be happy ever aftering with Jacques.

This didn’t feel very healthy to me. I mean, I am very happy that the story did not play the Love Fixes Trauma card, but I would have liked to see more of a sense of movement towards healing for Diana.

I was also troubled by Diana’s low expectations of those around her, though they were understandable – she finds it very hard to believe anything positive that anyone says, and generally needs to be told the same thing by multiple people on multiple occasions to believe it. And yet, she also doesn’t trust her own instincts, even when she should – it turns out that yes, she actually has a pretty good sense of when she is being followed, but she ignores this when others tell her that it’s perfectly safe. (Spoiler: it’s not perfectly safe)

Speaking of things that don’t feel quite healthy to me, let’s talk about Jacques. Jacques is French, charming, chivalrous and very protective of Diana. He falls for Diana almost immediately and is determined to court her even though she keeps telling him that it is Too Dangerous and that all she wants is a place to rest for a week or two before seeking a new life elsewhere. He is very gentle with Diana physically, and very sweet and accepting of her past.

“Do not speak so meanly about yourself. I cannot allow it. Those bastards hurt you, and they will pay. I swear it. Nothing you endured or that you did to survive will matter to me, Diana. Wounds heal.”

Just because she wanted his words to be true didn’t make it so. Lord, how she wanted to believe him. “Some wounds fester until they kill you. You are a kind person, but you are too idealistic. Nothing can make me the person I was before.”

He kissed her forehead and eased away. “I did not know that woman. You are probably right. She no longer exists on her own. Still, she is inside you, intertwined with three years of experiences that shaped the woman you are today. It is who you are that I am drawn to, not someone you used to be. When you embrace this Diana, you will be whole again.”

This is absolutely sweet and lovely, and he is very consistent in his love and respect and gentleness towards Diana. The problem is, he is also capable of lines like this:

“I have no right to be, but yes. I am angry that you dismiss any notion of our courting.”

Or this:

“Do not move. I will find you if you run, Diana, and I will be very vexed.”

In other scenes, his face darkens when she tells him that she doesn’t want his love or his courtship, and while he always contains his anger and moves away, it’s something that Diana notices. She doesn’t seem to perceive this as a threat, and he is always physically gentle with her, but it still made me uneasy. Especially as he kept on courting her after she said no. Because he knows that she has feelings for him. Which she does, but I really do not like the trope where I Know You Better Than You Know Yourself.

I think we are supposed to see Jacques as passionate, and as a gentle sort of Alpha hero – masterful, but tender. The trouble is, it would also be extremely easy to give him the controlling abusive boyfriend edit. There’s lots of ‘his Diana’ before she feels remotely the same way, and a fair bit of ‘I will not have this’. He is determined to help her, whether or not she wants his help, and this includes revealing her identity to others without her consent. And yes, he is also being very caring in between, but isn’t that how abusive relationships start?

Now, it must be noted that the entire relationship seems to be built on neither Jacques or Diana ever listening to a single thing the other says. Diana manages to perpetrate at least three rounds of the same Big Misunderstanding by ignoring Jacques whenever he says, no, actually, I would like to marry you and don’t think of you as a potential mistress, and she frequently assumes that he is thinking terrible things about her, even though he says every time, no, that’s not what I’m thinking at all. So not listening is a problem that they both have.

The trouble is, Jacques has a lot more power than Diana, so his high-handedness has more weight behind it. At one point Diana says outright that she is at his mercy and that he has given her little choice but to trust him, and he manages to completely miss the point and kind of flounces in response. This is, admittedly, quite a realistic response, but it is not one I prefer in my heroes.

I think part of the problem is that Jacques is also a survivor of traumatic things, but we don’t really know enough about his backstory to really get where he is coming from. We know that he was betrayed by his lover (or fiancée?) Monique, and that he only just succeeded in getting his parents out of France safely, but the nature of Monique’s betrayal isn’t clear – there’s just a lot about how he didn’t think he could trust again and how his relationship with Monique had not prepared him for the depth of feeling he has for Diana. I think this is where the book suffers from being read as a standalone, because I get the impression that we are already supposed to know and have sympathy for Jacques because of his past experiences – previous books have perhaps already done the heavy lifting for him, and so this book can focus more on Diana. But coming at it without having read the previous books, I see all of Diana’s trauma and am 100% on Team Diana, even when she frustrates me, because I figure she deserves some slack, whereas it’s hard to give Jacques the same benefit of the doubt.

What Diana and Jacques do have, from the start, is a strong mutual attraction and liking. They also, strangely, have an instant mutual trust (…rhymes with lust? This does seem to be the basis for it.). Within hours of meeting, Diana is comfortable enough with Jacques to ask him to hold her while she sleeps. And Jacques, for his part, immediately trusts Diana and believes her story, despite having been betrayed by a woman he loved before and despite the fact that Diana’s story is, frankly, lurid and improbable when compared to the official story. Jacques is also supportive of Diana’s career, recognises her astonishing intellectual abilities, and is extremely careful about consent when it comes to sex and flirtatious play. (He’s just not great at it when it comes to running Diana’s life and deciding to help her even when she has not requested his help and doesn’t want it, grr.) So they do have a few things going for them.

The series is called the Everton Domestic Society, and I have to say, if I go back to read more of this series, it will be because I want More of This, Please. The Society is set up to help ladies find meaningful work:

We have between eight and twenty ladies employed here at any one time. Most are young, but by society’s standards beyond their marriageable years. Some have been through horrors and need escape. Some are just trying to remove themselves from being a burden on their families’ finances. Because we house so many young women, and because some come from difficult situations, I employ six guards to discreetly watch the house and occasionally accompany a lady to places where she might be in danger. These men dress as footmen, but all have military backgrounds.

It also employs chaperones, who are older ladies who befriend their charges and accompany them to their places of employment. Diana is paired with Lady Honoria Chervil, a wealthy widow who works with the society in order to have something productive to do with her time. She is frivolous and fun on the surface, but she is also very perceptive and quick-thinking, and turns out to be a very useful person to have about you if you are being kidnapped. She is kind and pragmatic and very funny – at one point, Diana tells her that Jacques is ‘smart enough to stay away from a woman who nearly got him killed,’ to which Honoria retorts.

“Nonsense. Men are stupid by nature.”

Which doesn’t entirely help, but made me laugh. The other reason I really appreciated Honoria is that she is an island of pragmatism in the midst of an ocean of melodrama and heightened emotion. Which, on reflection, is mostly emanating from the men in the story – between Jacques’ tendency to fly off the handle at the notion that anyone could ever possibly distrust Diana, his best friend’s paroxysms of guilt at having done so, and the villain, who starts the novel in a state of obsession, but descends into frank insanity over the course of the story, there are a lot of highly strung men in the narrative. Even the quiet and understated absent-minded scientist character gets his moment of dramatic declamations, and the supposedly hard-headed and heartless head of the Horsemen is similarly guilt-stricken to an astonishing degree when he fails to protect Diana.

Meanwhile, the women include Mrs Fallcraft, the sensible headmistress of a boys’ school; Lady Everton, the pragmatic and clever owner of the Everton Domestic Society; Honoria herself; and of course Diana, who is surrounded by drama, but is herself extremely contained. So in fact, while the men in this story may not be ‘stupid by nature’, they certainly do seem to be ruled by their emotions in a way that the women are not, which is an interesting twist on the usual stereotypes.

Where does this leave me with this book? As you will have gathered, I think it has a lot of problems. It is not a smooth reading experience – I was repeatedly jarred by odd word choices or emotional tone that did not match the content. I have reservations about the relationship between Jacques and Diana, though I liked them both as individuals and thought they were interesting and complex characters. The angst levels were high – too high for my taste – and it really did irritate me just how determined Diana was to misinterpret Jacques and how determined Jacques was to know better than Diana about her own feelings.

And yet… I enjoyed this book far more than my concerns above might suggest. There was something about it that felt very gentle and soothing and comfortable to read. With the exception of the villain and his offsiders, every character we met was a kind, intelligent person, doing their best to deal with the world and the people around them with integrity. There were so many people who were willing to help Diana for so little reason. Essentially, there was a lot of kindness in the story, and I’m a big fan of kind stories, even when I think they are flawed.

A Lady’s Past is one of those books that works really well if you are reading it uncritically and purely for pleasure, but which suffers under critical scrutiny. On my first reading, I was swept away on the melodrama and sweetness and romance and angst and kindness, and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I had a few reservations about tone versus content, but it was a solid B. Alas, when I went back for a slower, more thoughtful re-read, the problems all started to jump out at me, and my second read was closer to a D. I think I’m going to give this a C minus overall.