Book Review

Earl’s Well That Ends Well by Jane Ashford

Content warning: Kidnapping, rape, violence against women. All off-screen, but you do see the results of it. Also, the heroine’s past contains, essentially, forced seduction by someone to whom she went for help.

Earl’s Well that Ends Well is a romance with a fair bit of adventure and melodrama – it reminds me a little of some of Heyer’s early works in both good and frustrating ways. I liked the fact that both Arthur and Teresa were older (forties and fifties) and established in themselves, and I really liked the cast of supporting characters, and the theatre setting. One thing that makes an older hero and heroine interesting, at least to me, is that they tend to know themselves rather well and be rather resistant to change. This can make for a really interesting romantic storyline…but alas, it didn’t quite work out for me this time.

Teresa has had a traumatic past – she is a Spanish noblewoman, and many unpleasant things happened to Spanish noblewomen during the Napoleonic wars – but she has built a comfortable, quiet life in London, with which she is perfectly content. She has learned to be highly suspicious of any man who shows any sort of romantic interest in her, and certainly has no interest in a romantic relationship.

Arthur’s past is sad, but less traumatic – he was happily married until his wife died of a fever when his children were still young, and he still carries grief for that loss. He has spent the last few years, apparently, helping matchmake some of his younger friends into relationships, and is just beginning to wonder if he’d like to marry again.

I found Arthur very frustrating. Teresa has extremely good reasons for not trusting wealthy, powerful men, and Arthur’s tendency to feel insulted and personally slighted by her determination to keep her distance made me uncomfortable. Arthur is a good and decent person, and progressive by contemporary standards – so far so good. But he lacks the imagination to realise that Teresa does not and cannot know this, and so he keeps coming up with strategies to spend time in her company (even though she is clearly uncomfortable with this!), so that he can convince her that he’s a Nice Guy, Really.

And he is, but he also has #notallmen written all over him. It’s not that I didn’t think he was good enough for Teresa; it’s more that he really needed someone to whack him over the head with a clue-by-four and point out that he was being a wee bit stalkerish and needed to back off.

Arthur is also the kind of hero who is very high-handed, and knows what’s best for everyone around him. This is probably a function of his wealth, status and gender, compounded by his age; he is very accustomed to the mentor role – but again, he reminded me of an early Heyer hero. Not always good at using his words, but very good at knowing best.

But Teresa seemed to like him anyway, so.

The mystery plot is quietly horrifying. It involves the disappearance of opera dancers from the theatre where Teresa works painting scenery and flats, and where Tom, her friend and Arthur’s protegé, is apprenticing as an actor. While nothing was described in graphic detail, what has happened to them is pretty awful and deserving of many a trigger warning. Something about this plot also made me feel like I was reading a romance written in a previous era. I think it was the combination of Luridly Awful Things Happening To Hapless Women, but having these things left carefully undescribed and outside the narrative. This is also very much the sort of book that hints at Dark Things, but is too decorous to describe them (it is also too decorous to describe less dark things – I wouldn’t call it a romance with a closed bedroom door because nobody gets as far as a bedroom in this story, just a kiss and a wedding, but you get the idea).

One interesting twist, however, was the presence of a group of young debutantes who have appointed themselves investigators. There are evidently previous books in this series featuring their other investigations, and they decide that they want to know what has happened to the dancers. This is a significant social problem, given that opera dancer was often a synonym for sex worker in that particular day and age.

The story did some interesting things here, because we see three pictures of womanhood contrasted with each other – you have the debutantes, who are wealthy, intelligent, determined, and very sheltered; you have the opera dancers, who are poor and exploited and cynical about the intentions of the debutantes; and in between, you have Teresa, who was much like the debutantes in her youth, but whose experience since then has been closer to that of the dancers. And she is torn between wanting to protect the debutantes from finding out too much, and feeling that maybe they really do need to know more. (Arthur, interestingly, is supportive of the young ladies’ investigations. Though he also quietly keeps them away from some of the realities of what they are investigating.) Interestingly, Teresa’s occupation of that liminal space between Not Quite Respectable and Respectable Enough is what allows her to bridge that gap and be active in the rescue of the dancers in a way that nobody else in the book can.

And it should be noted, of course, that all of this distance and separation only happens on the female side of the equation – it becomes clear early on that one of the opera dancers is, shall we say, very well acquainted with the father of one of the debutantes, and the debutantes are rather distressed by this discovery.

And then, having taken all of these things out of their boxes so that we can look at them, the story neatly replaces them all back in their boxes at the end of the story, almost entirely unchanged.

Plot spoilers herein

Teresa participates in the rescue of the dancers, but refuses to tell the debutantes about what they were rescued from, because it wouldn’t be proper for them to know. One of the debutantes gets politely married. The fact that one of the debutantes’ fathers has been sleeping with one of the opera dancers is something that everyone is uneasily aware of, but there is no big reveal, no change to any relationships within that family, just a sigh and an acknowledgment that, well, he always was a bit of a rotter, and what a shame that his wife has to put up with him.

And Teresa and Arthur sort themselves out and get married too, of course.

It’s just… back to the status quo, like the end of a Shakespeare comedy, where everyone gets tidily married off regardless of whether they actually liked each other. Everyone is respectable again, even Teresa.

And I find myself feeling torn between utter frustration – why go to all the trouble of examining these things and then revert to the status quo? – and a suspicion that this is actually kind of brilliant, because this is the sort of story where everyone steps out of their milieu for a while, and what DO you do with that at the end? Either you overthrow the entirety of society, or you quietly go on as if nothing has happened, even if you have been changed profoundly. And while I thirst for revolution in my fiction, I’m not entirely sure I want it in my real life. In other words, I think I might be complaining at the realism here.

I find that I haven’t really mentioned the romance. That’s because… there wasn’t much of one to speak of. There is mutual attraction, and then people run around doing a lot of things, and then at the end, the mutual attraction is acknowledged and everyone lives happily ever after. The romance, while not an afterthought, exactly, felt a bit secondary – there wasn’t a lot of conversation between Teresa and Arthur that was actually about them. I could see them being comfortable together, but that’s about it.

I have no clue how to grade this. The book does what it sets out to do, I think, it’s just that it isn’t particularly to my taste. And while it definitely kept me turning pages, it’s also a romance in which the romance itself felt pretty flat, which is a big problem. Though Arthur did improve on acquaintance, I found his attitude early in the book very problematic.

(It did make me think lots of thinky thoughts though. This was going to be a two paragraph Lightning Review, and look what happened.)

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Earl’s Well That Ends Well by Jane Ashford

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  1. Star says:

    Jane Ashford is a fascinating author. I’m not sure I’ve actually genuinely liked most of her books I’ve read?, but I always want to read them anyway because she always seems to be trying something just a bit different without being obviously revolutionary, and this appeals to me, especially right now, when so many historical romances are sounding like someone stitched together a list of tropes drawn from a hat.

  2. Carrie G says:

    I haven’t read the book,so I’m responding only to what you’ve described in the review. It seems to me that Arthur is written in a realistic way for a man of his time, station, and age. While it appeals on one level to have “woke” heroes, I admit I get a little tired of so many authors writing modern sensibilities in their characters. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t really demand total authenticity in historicals. That would be more like Dickens and probably depressing.

    Given so many men today with wealth, status, and “of a certain age” have the same (and worse) attitudes of entitlement and #notallmen, your description of Arthur seems benign by comparison.

  3. Arijo says:

    I really like your review. It touches on my problem with historical romance – I get irked when the h&h are too modern and/or the historical facts are glossed over, but on the other hand, I can’t stand the dynamic when the h&h act too much in accordance with the societal norms of their time and I get mad at the injustices when they’re depicted in any realistic way (and kiss goodbye any chance to enjoy a romance when you’re mad…). It’s a no win conundrum. It takes a talented author to successfully navigate these waters. In the 3 books by Jane Ashford I’ve read, she managed.

    So, despite this being a C, you made me interested in reading Earl’s Well That Ends Well, because debutantes (almost?) interacting with opera dancers sounds very different. Even if they go back to their boxes, the experience certainly left something behind, and I could kinda picture them next pushing for women’s rights and if they have kids, raising them to be progressists… so yay for hope? (My problem here: I could picture the debutantes doing that, but not the opera dancers… their happy end is surviving I guess? And that right there is why historicals are hard for me. At least injustice in contemporary makes me get off my ass and do something in RL; injustice in historicals just makes me feel impotent.)

  4. Lisa F says:

    This has been getting C’s up and down the board – Ashford keeps getting close to B/A territory for me but never beyond it.

  5. BellaInAus says:

    I’m having trouble with the cover. Those two look very well preserved for forties and fifties.

  6. chacha1 says:

    LOL @BellaInAus. Well-preserved and thin! and what time period is that dress from? Not to mention the hairstyles. If Teresa was ‘young’ during the Napoleonic wars and is now 45ish, it has to be around 1840.

    Personally, if I’m getting ‘realism’ in chauvinistic behavior and awful things being done to underprivileged female characters, then I want realism everywhere. Give me an open bedroom door and some traumatized debutantes.

  7. Big K says:

    Great review! Love your thinky thoughts!

  8. HeatherS says:

    Can I just jump in and say that, while I’ve never read any of Ashford’s books, this opening description in the library catalog made me do a mental flail of rage:

    “This beautiful, clean Regency romance from beloved author Jane Ashford takes you to a glittering world of revelations and romance, where a lonely earl can find love where he least expects it…”

    “CLEAN”. I HATE THAT WORD TO DESCRIBE ROMANCES. UGH! I know we’ve had this discussion many times, but it never fails to irk me when I see it.

    *wanders off grumbling*

  9. Susana says:

    I understand that the reviewer felt there wasn’t much or any romance in this book, but I suggest that it’s a way to imagine how romance and desire might return to the life of a middle-aged woman who has experienced trauma, rape, years of sex that wasn’t fully consensual. Having freed herself from that and escaped to England, how does she attain a relationship of freedom? More interesting, how does the novelist describe turbulent waters she has to chart? One way is to tell the horrifying story of young women from poorer families who are kidnapped, as the opera dancers were. I think that the Teresa story is named obliquely. Having gotten to know the Earl in other novels (I read 2) we’re supposed to know him, and he’s pretty nice. I agree completely with the other reviewer: the debutantes are terrific; they illustrate how smart young women can be if they don’t suffer deprivations, poverty, etc. They are able to solve problems. None of these characters are going to become suffragists, though the heiress might help some single mothers. But it show how much money and class shape the lives of all women in different worlds.

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