Foolish Fancy

[vintageromancereader]

The Irresistible Earl

Miss Frances Dean, known to friends and family as Fancy, had very firm ideas about a woman's rightful place in the world. As far as she was concerned, a woman should be educated, independent, and never, ever bow to the tyranny of a man.

The Earl of Wychfield was everything that Fancy mistrusted in a male. He was dazzlingly handsome, fabulously wealthy and superbly self-assured, with all that it took it win any woman he wanted. Fancy would only be happy that he could not possibly want her when the stunning Lady Celeste Standon made herself so very available to him. Because though Fancy told herself she was fully prepared to resist the advances of this man armed with so many weapons of attraction and snares of seduction, she trembled at what might happen should she be put to the test...

Original Publisher: Signet
Original Year of Publication: 1997
Page Count: 236

My last read was so awesome I wasn't sure what I wanted to follow it up with, so I eventually pulled a random number generator out on part of Mount TBR and chose this. While it started out fairly promising, it went downhill fast for me, and I couldn't wait to be finished with it.

That blurb is incredibly misleading. Fancy is of the "marriage is legal prostitution" radical feminist bent, and she doesn't hesitate to say so directly to the Earl the very first time she meets him - which, considering this is a marriage of convenience book (as well as battle of the sexes), means we're off to somewhat of a rocky start.

Unfortunately, Fancy lives up to her titular moniker, because she is incredibly foolish for the entire story. She is obstinate, sullen, and disdainful the entire time; when the earl proves himself to be competent and caring (he was a second son who made a military career before returning to take up the reins of the earldom), she only gets more and more angry with him. How dare he not meet her prejudiced expectations of what all aristocratic men are? The only way she knows to channel and/or express her feelings is to pick fights with pretty much everyone she knows, and this gets incredibly tedious incredibly quickly.

It's especially bad because Wychfield is so laid-back and easygoing. He rarely rises to her bait, which only makes her even madder, and honestly I had no idea what he saw in her. She is so immature, yet he feels she is the perfect person to take control of his unruly family of younger stepsiblings. This is probably because every other woman is his life is vain, selfish, and empty-headed, but still. I can't imagine *wanting* to spend your entire life bickering with your spouse, but I suppose it takes all kinds.

Lady Celeste is not much of a villain/other woman, considering she is Wychfield's sister-in-law, and had in fact dumped him for his brother in the first place. That doesn't stop Fancy from believing that he's really love with Celeste but doesn't want to admit it. Because this woman doesn't have enough to battle against, she has to make things up, too.

Ugh. This gets one star for Wychfield, who honestly deserves better, and half a star for the writing not being absolutely terrible, even if the heroine is. I'd be willing to give this author another try, but this one is going on the PBS pile.

⭐ 1/2

Comments

[vintageromancereader]

Yeah, she definitely had Some Ideas, courtesy of her...ahem, eccentric aunt who raised her from age 12 as proof of radical feminist theory in practice, but without an actual mind of her own, it falls very, very flat. When Fancy wasn't being disdainful, she was playing the martyr (and the earl rightly called her on it multiple times, which just made his interest in her even more baffling, tbh).