Book review: Sylvester by Georgette Heyer

The backdrop: Endowed with rank, wealth, and elegance, Sylvester, Duke of Salford, has decided to travel to Wiltshire to discover if the Hon Phoebe Marlowe will meet his exacting requirements for a bride. If he doesn't expect to meet a tongue-tied stripling in need of both manners and conduct, he is even more intrigued when his visit causes Phoebe to flee her home. They meet again on the road to London, where her carriage has come to grief in the snow. Yet Phoebe, already caught in one imbroglio, now knows she soon could be well deep in another...

Rating: ***** (Outstanding)

Detailed Review: This book is a masterpiece, a rare gem of novels, that always brings me a smile and more than one laugh. I wish some nice producer one day adapts this book to a television series. It would make a rousing romantic comedy, full of lively characters who jump from one outstanding situation to another.

They were two unlikely people.

Sylvester, Duke of Salford, has it all - looks, wealth, rank, and esteem. He is accomplished to a fault, proud and arrogant of his very being, and exacting in his requirements for his bride.

Phoebe Marlow is a motherless woebegone girl with neither countenance nor deportment. She is a fearless horsewoman, but trembles at unkind words from her stepmother. What she lacks in beauty or manners, she makes it up with her imagination and care for others. And she dreams for the day when she can leave her oppressing childhood home and breathe in her own small cottage and write novels.

They meet.

First, in a ball in London. For Sylvester, it was a forgettable experience when he has to do his duty by standing up for insipid debutantes. Phoebe Marlow is one such duty. For Phoebe, it was an unforgettable experience when the duke uninterestingly dances with her and then cuts her direct at Almack's. Such arrogance! And those wicked eyebrows! Lo and behold, Sylvester is cast as the villain, with a curiously odd name of Ugolino, in Phoebe's debut gothic romance novel.

Their second meeting. Sylvester wishes to marry to provide a companion to his mother and a heir. Although he has drawn a list of five beauties to choose one as his wife, he is intrigued by his mother's confession that in his childhood, she had betrothed him (as a prank) to her late friend's daughter. Phoebe Marlow is to be his intended. Sylvester, without realizing that he had an occasion to meet her before, decides to travel to Wiltshire to look her up as a prospect. Phoebe, chagrined to know from her stepmother, that the duke is going to offer for her decides to elope.

Their third meeting. Phoebe decides to go to London to seek shelter from her grandmother, the famed Lady Ingham. And helping her in this venture is her childhood best friend and neighbor, Thomas Orde. If only Thomas had not managed to overturn the curricle on the way and break his leg, and Sylvester glad at his escape from his regrettable trip had not decided to check up the absconding couple, Phoebe would not have the misfortune to ask help from the very duke she's running away from.

And this is how Phoebe and Sylvester start their romance - from the rustic inn in the snowed countryside, to the scandal-ridden society in London, to a sea-faring journey to France, and back.

Read it to enjoy it!

• The plot: Delightful. It's old wine in an old bottle, but the flavors are amazing.


• Lead characters: Sylvester and Phoebe are loveable. Totally wholesome and delightful.


• Supporting characters: Awesome! They just make up this pot-boiler even crazier and more fantastic; whether they are Sylvester and Phoebe's family members, or their near or distant friends, or total strangers like the innkeeper and her family, or even the French dog, Chien, who is unwittingly embroiled in a humorous incident involving shoe tassels.

• Hotness quotient: The book is more tender than hot. Forget about sex, there is lamentably only one kissing scene in the last paragraph. Sigh!
  

The best scene of the book: In any book, I'm able to figure out the best scenes, but it's hard over here. All the scenes are delightful, especially all the ones with Sylvester and Phoebe. Since the book lacks sexy/hot scenes, I tend to re-read those with Sylvester and Phoebe's tender moments. One such scene is written below, where Sylvester proposes to Phoebe, a botched attempt as you can see:

'Well?'

She turned her head towards the window, startled. She had never heard Sylvester speak so roughly, and wondered why he should do so.

'You may as well tell me. Your face has already informed me that it is not a pleasant missive.'

'No,' she said. 'She supposed me - when she wrote this - to have persuaded Tom to take me home. I think Muker must have encouraged her to think it, to be rid of me. She is very jealous of me. She may even have believed me to be running away with Tom. That - that was my fault.'

'Unnecessary to tell me that! You have a genius for bringing trouble upon yourself.'

She looked at him for a moment, hurt and surprise in her eyes, and then turned away, and walked over to the fire. It seemed so needlessly cruel, and so unlike him, to taunt her when he knew her to be distressed that she felt bewildered. It was certainly a taunt, but there had been no mockery in his voice, only anger. Why he should be angry, what she had done to revive his furious resentment, she could not imagine. She found it a little difficult to speak, but managed to say: 'I am afraid I have. I seem always to be tumbling into a scrape. Hoydenish, my mother-in-law was used to call me, and did her best to teach me prudence and propriety. I wish she had succeeded.'

'You are not alone in that wish!' he said savagely.

The harsh, angry voice was having its inevitable affect on her: she began to feel sick, inwardly shivering, and was obliged to sit down, digging her nails into the palms of her hands.

'You tumbled into a scrape as you are pleased to call it, when I first made your acquaintance!' he continued. 'It would be more correct to say that you flung yourself into it, just as you flung yourself aboard that ship! If you choose to behave like a hoyden it is your own affair, but that is never enough for you! You don't scruple to embroil others in your scrapes! Thomas has been a victim, I have been one - my God, have I not! - and now it is your grandmother! Does she cast you off? Do you think yourself hardly used? You have no one but yourself to thank for the ills you've brought on your own head!'

She listened to this tirade, rigid with shock, scarcely able to believe that it was Sylvester and not a stranger who hurled these bitter accusations at her. The thought flitted across her brain that he was deliberately feeding his wrath, but it was overborne by her own anger, which leaped from a tiny spark to a blaze.

He said suddenly, before she could speak: 'No - no! It's of no use! Sparrow, Sparrow!'

She hardly heard him. She said in a voice husky with passion: 'I have one other person to thank! It is yourself, my lord Duke! It was your arrogance that caused me to make you the model for my villain! But for you I should never have run away from my home! But for you no one need have known I was the author of that book! But for you I should not have flung myself aboard that schooner! You are the cause of every ill that has befallen me! You say I ill-used you: if I did you are wonderfully revenged, for you have ruined me!'

To her astonishment, and, indeed, indignation, he gave the oddest laugh.

As she glared at him he said in the strangest voice she had yet heard: 'Have I? Well - if that's so, I will make reparation! Will you do me the honour, Miss Marlow, of accepting my hand in marriage?'

Thus Sylvester, an accomplished flirt, making his first proposal.