C+
Genre: Historical: European, Romance
Anything But a Duke is a heartwarming romance that suffers from a lack of compelling conflict. The heroine is an inventor. The hero worked his way up from poverty in a Dickensian manner. There is banter, there is food, there are clothes. It’s enjoyable but largely forgettable.
The story begins in 1845, which places it in the Victorian Era and amid the Industrial Revolution. Aidan Iverson grew up in the workhouse where his mother left him and his sister. He ran away, promising his sister that he would come back for her, and proceeded to amass a tidy fortune in business. Although he’s respected in society, he feels he won’t be TRULY respected until he has a connection to a title, which he can get by marrying a titled woman. He’s also trying to find his birth mother and his sister.
Meanwhile, Diana Ashby, an inventor, is desperate to sell her latest invention (a vacuum cleaner!) because her family is struggling financially. She wants Aidan’s financial backing. Diana’s family has “a baronetcy that passed to my uncle,” which isn’t going to be enough for Aidan’s nobility needs, but she is friends with several titled and eligible single women. She agrees to help Aidan find a wife in exchange for his helping her find a buyer for her inventions. However, by the time Aiden makes this deal, he already is attracted to Diana, and he impulsively adds that if she can’t find him a wife within a month then they could marry each other.
You can already see that the conflict here isn’t much of a conflict. By his third meeting with Diana, Aidan already knows that he likes her and is already becoming more flexible about his desire to marry into nobility. He doesn’t actually need to marry up; he just has emotional baggage about being an outsider. So there’s little actual loss involved in his changing his plans. Meanwhile Diana’s only issues are that she wants to keep inventing, which clearly Aidan would be all for, and she doesn’t want Aidan to give up his goals for her, which is already a non-issue.
Although the conflict isn’t compelling, the characters are. Diana meets Aidan when she sees him being attacked on the street – she chases away his attackers with her umbrella, thus earning my eternal admiration. Diana is passionate about inventions that make life easier for middle class and lower income women – her “household pneumatic cleaning system”, for instance, and a corset unlacing machine for women who don’t have a maid. She describes herself as having racing thoughts that “move faster than my tongue” but we don’t get to see much of this other than a certain blunt quality.
Aidan has a lot of angst as well as dogged determination and a deadpan sense of humor. He also has a lot of past trauma and loss that is not fully resolved. I found the ending, as relates to Aidan’s sister, to be realistic but also very sad. I can’t criticize the discovery he makes, because it is entirely probable, but it left me much sadder than I expect from a romance novel.
He finds out that his mother was a servant and his father was an Earl who is now deceased. Aidan is accepted by his half-sister, but he doesn’t find out why his mother gave him and his sister to the workhouse nor what happened to her, and his sister is presumed dead. There’s some mourning, but it feels very abrupt as it’s dropped in at the very end of the book and followed closely by the happy romantic ending.
The protagonists have great chemistry and the scenes in which Diana introduces Aidan to her eligible friends provides humor as well as a promise of future books, as each woman clearly has other interests, whether they admit these interests to themselves or not. I admired Diana’s methodological approach – she has helpful notes! A sign that Diana and Aidan are compatible comes when he presents her with his helpful notes about possible buyers for her inventions, including not only public information but also personal details that can help her make a connection.
The biggest strength of the book is its engaging characters who are not dukes or earls but rather very much creatures of a time, when aristocracy was declining and business was rising. The characters have a level of class mobility that works in both directions, as Diana’s family is near destitution, and Aidan is received by all but the highest and most pompous levels of society. They are also strongly driven – Diana wants to support her family but also to prove her worth as an inventor, and Aidan wants to feel a sense of belonging.
Overall, I enjoyed this book (see: inventions, banter, food, clothes), and yet the level of conflict was so low that after I read the book I forgot all about everything that had happened in it. Frankly, when Diana refuses to marry Aidan because she thinks she’s not what he wants, it’s not gripping or romantic. It’s just irritating. Meanwhile, yes, Aidan gets some resolution about his vanished family, but it’s so small and so sad. I have to give this book a C+ for lack of compelling plot.
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So a romance between minor aristocracy and trade/middle class still has to have the word “duke” on the cover twice? Is this peak dukeness? Can we now look forward to a duke deflation? At this point my eyes slide away from duke covers just like they slide away from billionaire covers.
@Teev
Is this peak dukeness?
Any chance we’re allowed to take it as a joke? “I did say there wouldn’t be any dukes, but you thought I was kidding.”
I want to know how this Victorian vacuum works. In Little Women, Laurie buys a “sweeper” for Meg and Brook as a wedding gift and Alcott says it takes the nap off the carpet but leaves the dirt. I always wondered what that was and how it worked but as a kid I imagined it as a ye olde vacuum cleaner.
I just finished reading this and I would give it a solid B. Lesser books have ridden this trope before (“I cannot marry you for your own good…”). I enjoyed it for all the reasons that Carrie S. stated as well as her review.
@EJ: I’m assume the Little Women carpet sweeper was something like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpet_sweeper
In fact, I would have been more impressed if Diana had invented something like that. I believe the book takes places in the 1840’s? Her vacuum, using pneumatic principals seems somewhat vague. She wants the dirt to go the basement–as in a central vacuum system, but when she makes demonstration and copies for sale, where does the dirt go? Why not just have a bag? Very little description of the vacuum itself–does it have a brush head with rollers?
SPOILER REFERENCE: I didn’t mind his lack of mourning for his sister–he had assumed she was dead for some time. The motivations of his mother does remain unanswered. END OF SPOILER REFERENCE.
@LMC
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Wikipedia says Bissell patented it in 1876. LW was published in 1868, so maybe there were earlier models that didn’t work that well, as illustrated by the book.