Like many other proofreaders and copy editors freelancing for the great publishing houses in New York City before the internet took hold, I reached the point of hubris with my third dozen of Regency romance-novel assignments: “I could do this.” And yet, I didn’t want to. Why write a book that has already been written so many times, in many instances with enviable entertainment value and success.
Perhaps it was my New York stubbornness prevailing, but I prefer to think of it as my egalitarian nature. What about the men? I asked myself. Surely they felt as constricted as the women by society’s rules and expectations. The men may have behaved badly, or at the least, been granted license to behave badly, but the women clung to their own set of double standards too. Not all Regency heroes lived free of inner conflict, and not all heroines were pure of heart. Such was my thesis. Brace yourself, you won’t meet a classic Regency heroine in the first two pages of Noble, or even the first ten, and there is no “perfect gentleman” on the landscape either. This is a Regency romance novel turned upside down, with the fiction so blended into historical events you’ll ask “Did this really happen?” At least, that’s the plan.
I enjoyed Noble; I found it to be a different kind of Regency novel. Yes, it’s got all the standard elements you’d expect: a love story, a marriage of convenience, socially-privileged “ton,” and socially-constrained commoners. How the author advances the romance format is in the dimension she gives to all of the key characters: male and female, privileged or poor. At the start, I didn’t like some of the characters as people, but as the story evolved, I grew to understand them. The other distinction I really liked is that, while the story begins in Regency Britain, the characters migrate to early New York where they find the opportunity to reinvent themselves. I appreciated the author’s meticulous attention to historical detail and language. Even though I’m a native New Yorker, I learned some new things about my state. Hope there’s a sequel.