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Because why not?

This post is brought to you by my tendency not to think things through before I write about them.

So, the thing about Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey is that she was lousy at endings. Like, she’s so good at putting prickly characters in twisty emotional situations and still having everything be super charming, but then the end is always a cop-out, or rushed, or suddenly makes you hate all the characters you loved for most of the book. Anyway, I read a review of one of her books at Fleur in her World the other day, and Fleur had the same issue with the last 10% of the book, but her praise for the first 90% made me want to read something by Mrs. G. de H.V., because when she’s good, she’s very, very good.

Flaming June skirts the ending issue altogether, by…not having one, sort of. And I can’t decide how I feel about that. Mrs. G. de H.V. basically spends half the book turning tropes upside down, and the other half taking other tropes super seriously and I can’t tell whether she’s doing any of it on purpose. And the self indulgent part of me wants a sequel, and the critical part of me is pretty impressed with Mrs. G. de H.V. for leaving things unresolved, and then just about all of me wants a sequel that has almost nothing to do with the main characters, but follows the villainess as she carries out the plans the heroine lays out for her.

Anyway.

When I started Flaming June, I thought, “oh, this is Mrs. G. de H.V.’s L.T. Meade book,” because there’s a breezily unconventional American girl and a sweet, sheltered English one who become best friends. But Elma, the English girl, hasn’t got the depth that Meade’s more conventional characters have, and Cornelia, the American, has more of Mrs. G. de H.V.’s respect than Meade ever gave any of her characters. Cornelia has come to stay with her cranky spinster aunt in a quiet neighborhood, and of course everyone’s familiar with the narrative of the cheerful young person making over the stiff and uncompromising elderly relative, but Mrs. G. de H.V. passes that by — it’s a story, but it’s not this story. Likewise the story of the brash American and the proud English girl finding common ground — Mrs. G. de H.V. concentrates on Cornelia and Elma’s friendship only long enough to throw Elma into the arms of her longtime crush, Geoffrey Greville. And to introduce Cornelia to Captain Rupert Guest, who doesn’t like her at all, until he does.

Mrs. G. de H.V. structures her romances as problems, which I enjoy, except that she’s kind of too good at it. I think that’s where a certain amount of her lousy finishes come from — she creates problems that are actually insoluble, and has to do violence to her characters in order to resolve them. The Guest/Cornelia problem is that they’re nothing alike, have no common interests, and don’t always even like each other very much. Which, if you think about it, is a problem you see in romances all the time, only it’s waved away, and you’re assured that the characters are going to be very happy together. And if the author is good enough, you believe it.

So, yeah, I was kind of concerned. Because Mrs. G. de H.V. IS good enough, but she also has this tendency to write herself into a corner. And that’s what she does, and…that’s where she leaves it. My respect for Mrs. G. de H.V. has increased enormously.

I realize I’m neglecting the book itself to talk about my various Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey feels, but I do find her really fascinating. She’s so good at certain things, but I never trust her. She’s always doing icky things like shoving characters back into their strictly defined gender roles and/or destroying everything I liked about them with one action. So when I come to a book like Flaming June, and I can see Guest constructing a different version of Cornelia in his head, one that’s based mostly on her least characteristic actions, I’m apprehensive. And then Mrs. G. de H.V. explicitly recognizes that. It’s tremendously satisfying and not satisfying at all. But mostly I feel pretty good about it. Well done, Mrs. G. de H.V.

So, this is what happens when I ask for recommendations: I download everything that looks appealing, read maybe half of it, and leave the rest sitting on my kindle indefinitely. Except that I also sometime come back to things. I’ve had Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey’s Peggy Saville books on my kindle since James recommended them more than a year ago. I finally got around to reading them last weekend, and I really enjoyed them. I mean, I thought there were some structural issues, and also when I look back at the two books it seems like nothing ever actually happened, but it was entertaining nothing.

Mr. Asplin is a vicar and he also prepares young men for college. The first boy who boarded with the Asplins was Arthur Saville, and everyone loved him, so when Mrs. Saville writes and says she’d like to leave her daughter Peggy with the Asplins while she joins her husband in India, they’re happy to have her. Peggy joins a group of young people that includes Mr. Asplin’s pupils Robert Darcy and Oswald Elliston, his son Maxwell (in the second book his name is sometimes Rex), and his daughters Esther (serious and studious) and Mellicent (plump and stupid and yes her name is really spelled that way). After some awkward and sometimes hilarious posturing, Peggy becomes the ringleader of the group and shows herself to be clever, creative, talented, bossy, and occasionally thoughtless. She and Rob become especially good friends, enlisting each other for help and support for everything from Peggy’s homesickness to the magazine contest Rob wants to enter.

I like Peggy and Rob’s relationship a lot. I also like that Peggy is allowed to have faults, and that the book doesn’t try to correct them. Rob’s beautiful sister Rosalind has faults too, but she’s not a bad person and she and Peggy go from not liking each other to liking each other very much without either of them really changing, which is cool.  And that’s About Peggy Saville.

The second book skips ahead a few years. Peggy has, in the intervening time, spent two more years with the Asplins, and gone out to India to be with her parents. When More About Peggy opens, they’re returning to England, planning to buy a house and settle down. Peggy is recognizably herself, but also recognizably more grown up (I gained a lot of respect for Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey over the course of these two books) and it’s not hard to believe that Rob’s older brother Hector, who happens to be on the ship with them, would fall in love with her. And Peggy recognizes the fact and isn’t really sure what to do about it.

That’s kind of the most fun thing about this book, because it’s a really enjoyable mix of practical and romantic. Peggy makes no attempt to disguise to herself the fact that when she’s returning to England, she’s really looking forward to reconnecting with Rob. And when they meet, there are no stupid things keeping them apart; they’re really pleased to see each other. Peggy and Rob are both refreshingly straightforward all the time. When things get (moderately) complicated, it’s only because Hector thinks he’s in a different story.

Then there’s Peggy’s brother Arthur, who is in love with Rosalind Darcy. Everyone’s in love with Rosalind, because she’s super pretty, but Arthur is the one who she’s a little in love with back. And obviously this is a really common romance trope, one that’s kind of angsty in a really enjoyable way, and then…Rosalind decides

I’m not quite sure how I feel about The Heart of Una Sackville. When I was about halfway through, I’d all but decided that it was my new favorite book, but I hated the ending.

This is one of those “Dear Diary, I have just been given this diary…” books, which is sometimes good and sometimes bad, because the narrator will always fall in love with someone and remain oblivious for far longer than you would think possible. And when it’s done well, that’s one of my favorite tropes (see Dear Enemy), but when it’s too obvious, it can be completely infuriating. Here, it starts out infuriating, briefly becomes pretty much the best thing ever, and then does that thing that often happens in romance novels where the unresolved sexual tension all drains away at once without leaving anything in its place.

So. Una Sackville. She’s the second daughter of a wealthy landowner, good-natured and intelligent, but plump and moderately good-looking where her sister Vere is beautiful and ethereal. On the other hand, Vere is bitchy and manipulative and enjoys making all the men she meets fall in love with her, while Una is flawed but conscientious. Then there’s Will Dudley, studying at a local estate in preparation for inheriting a large property from an uncle somewhere in the North. Una promptly falls in love with him, although of course it takes her most of the book to realize it. Rachel Greaves, who lives with and nurses her invalid parents, is Will’s fiancee, and pretty much a saint, although somehow not in an irritating way.

That’s all pretty routine. It doesn’t really get good until the Sackvilles’ house burns down one night, and Vere is badly injured.

Things that are awesome about the middle section of this book:

1. Vere, post-injury. She ends up lying flat on her back unable to move her head more than a quarter of an inch in any direction for more than a year, and she’s furious about it. She smiles and acts unconcerned and refuses to refer to her injuries, and inside she’s seething. It’s awesome. I love that she doesn’t really become sweet and contented until she knows for sure she’s going to get better, and that when she finally decides to marry the one suitor who’s been faithful throughout her illness, Una and Will talk about how nice it is that Vere actually believes she’s loved him all along.

2. Will being in love with Una and trying to hide it. Something about his combination of casual friendliness, serious conversation, and unreadable looks, with the occasional near-disintegration of his control, is kind of impossibly romantic.

3. Una being completely consistent in her obliviousness/denial/teenage angst and self-loathing. It’s not just Will. It’s also the way she promises her father that she’ll take a walk with him every day, and how, when she forgets, she insists that it’s okay because she really meant to remember, but doesn’t buy her own argument. It’s the way she keeps telling herself that her friend Lorna’s brother isn’t in love with her and ends up having to refuse his offer of marriage and torturing herself with the idea that she’s ruined his life. But, most of all, it is the way she keeps saying to herself, “I can’t possibly be in love with Will; he’s engaged.”

And really, that’s good enough to counter a lot of sappiness and dullness towards the end. But that’s not the real problem anyway.

Remember Rachel? She’s lovely. She’s not exciting, but Una and Will both really like her. And even if they didn’t, it would obviously be cruel of Will to break the