I’ll be honest, I probably wouldn’t have picked up An Heiress to Remember had I not liked the other books in the series (and Maya Rodale’s writing in general). It’s got that “dude seeks revenge on the woman who didn’t choose him” plotline, something I find tiresome and rarely resolved to my satisfaction. I’m so glad I gave it a chance though because this book, while not perfect, was absolutely a ton of fun to read. It also sent me down a research rabbit-hole that kept me up all night Googling the history of department stores.

Beatrice Goodwin is a Manhattan heiress at the turn of the century. Her father owns Goodwins, Manhattan’s premiere department store. When the book opens, Beatrice’s family has arranged for her to marry a duke in desperate need of her inheritance. The issue is that Beatrice is in love with Wes Dalton, an Irish immigrant and a clerk in her father’s store. Her family has firmly deemed him Not Acceptable, and 20-year-old Beatrice does what she’s supposed to and marries the duke. Wes walks away broken-hearted, having been paid $3000 by her family to get lost.

When the book opens Beatrice has returned to New York sixteen years later, a divorcee and determined to live her own life and enjoy her freedom. She discovers that her brother Edward has managed to bankrupt their late father’s store, and that Wes Dalton has built a competing store across the street called Daltons.

In the years she’s been gone Wes has gone from shopboy to the third richest man in NYC, building a retail empire, all in an effort to drive her family’s store out of business.

Wes really needs to calm the fuck down.

Beatrice being back in town disrupts his plan for revenge. She’s determined to revamp the family store, and she’s got the business sense and creative genius to do so.

When the book first starts out, and Beatrice and Wes are clearly adversaries, I felt kinda meh about the plot. Like I said, revenge-seeking heroes aren’t my thing. So the first quarter of the book dragged a bit and I didn’t care for Wes much at all.

But as Beatrice starts innovating and pulls customers away from Daltons, their relationship shifts from something hostile to one of friendly competition. Wes admires the changes Beatrice has put into place (offering free childcare for workers and shoppers for one) and as she begins to steal his customers and employees, he feels challenged by her. They enter into what amounts to a friendly rivalry and fliration, and I liked that immensely.

In this scene we get Wes beginning to remove his head from his rectum. It’s the start of the shift in his character and the scene where I get really sucked into the book:

For the first time since her return to New York, Dalton stopped to think about what she must have endured to get back here to this ballroom. Divorce wasn’t unheard of, but it was still rare, especially among the sort of people in this ballroom. For a woman to refuse a duke was nearly unheard of. He wondered what life was like that she became so desperate to risk such a great scandal.

What she must have suffered through to prove she deserved it.

His heart suffered a pang for what the girl he once loved had lived through.

If only she’d chosen me instead.

But it was too late for thoughts like that.

“I know everyone thinks I’m a scandalous failure of a woman,” she said with a shrug. “But really I find it quite liberating. I have lived too long trying to please other people, I now wish only to please myself.”

“I’ve been underestimating you, haven’t I?” Dalton said.

“You and the rest of the world.”

“I admit, I’m curious to see what you’ll do next.”

She smiled a wicked smile, and he felt it like an arrow to his heart. Somehow they had moved close together–pressed close by the crowds, drawn together. So close he could feel the heart of her, breathe in the faint scent of her perfume.

“Are you saying you’ve got your eyes on me, Dalton?”

“As a matter of fact, I do,” he murmured.

And his gaze locked with hers and for a second it felt like they were eighteen again, which is to say a yearning so intense that the rest of the world could have fallen away and he wouldn’t have noticed. All of a sudden, all at once, it felt like the years hadn’t happened. And he could, maybe, reach out and tuck a wayward strand of hair behind her ear, whisper a secret, press his lips to hers, laugh about something funny only to them. How could she ever have doubted him?

“But you won’t give up on your plans for revenge, will you?”

“Not when I’m so. Damned. Close.”

Beatrice not only makes Goodwins profitable again, she steals business from Dalton’s and begins to pose a threat to Wes’s store. Women line up for the experience of spending a day at Goodwins.

This is where I fell down my late-night Google rabbit hole. I never would have considered department stores a feminist innovation, but they were. Department stores were one of the first places where it was socially acceptable for a woman to go unchaperoned, and many were female-focused places. They helped women leave the home, earn a wage, and put household spending power more firmly in their hands.

Beatrice doesn’t do this all alone either; she has the support of The Ladies of Liberty Club–female entrepreneurs and professionals who support each other. Some of these secondary characters were heroines of previous books and others are based on real life women like Emily Warren Roebling, the woman who oversaw the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.

I really, really love heroines who have female support systems in novels so this delighted me immensely, and I was happy to see the heroines of the previous two books in the series.

I also loved the descriptions of Goodwins and the way Beatrice breathed life into the family store. The details of the window displays alone were a delight.

When Wes decides he doesn’t really care so much about revenge, he and Beatrice enter into a friendly rivalry and affair (“competitors by day, lovers by night”). They try to outdo each other not to drive the other business into the ground, but as a way of challenging each other’s business sense and creativity. They start having fun. That kind of rivalry, not built on malice, is something I was totally down for.

I was initially worried that the plot wouldn’t resolve in a way that allowed Wes and Beatrice to be together, but still preserve Beatrice’s independence. I’m pleased to say, without spoilers, that the end was entirely satisfactory.

So while it took me awhile to get into An Heiress to Remember, once the hero stopped being a door knob and got over himself, I found the romance compelling. Added to that great details about 19th century department stores as a feminist innovation and some solid femaile friendships, and I had a ton of fun.