Title: Practical Widow to Passionate Mistress
Genre: Regency Romance
Author: Louise Allen
Sometimes a really good book is hidden behind a god awful title, and a sexy regency lady undressing cover- here something that’s jacketed in a way that makes it look embarrassing to read in public delivers a hidden delight. Part of a trilogy about three hapless sisters who escape their abusive father by venturing out in the world, Practical Widow does what it says on the tin and then gives you a good story in the bargain. I can honestly say I enjoyed this book enough to want to find out other works by the author. It also has some interesting developments in convenient plot tropes, showing how the relentless shifts in modern morals effect what is acceptable to show going on in the past. Gone are the dear old ancient dukes with their sexless marriages so we can have mid-twenties virgins when marrying at seventeen was not-uncommon, and Allen also gives us a heroine who seems to be relatively true to period without being too much a niave waif. The bigamy was also an entertaining complication.
Miss Megan Shelley (Meg), daughter of the despotic, physically and emotionally abusive Reverend Shelley, elopes to escape her untenable situation and finds herself going from romantic girl to overworked under appreciated wife to a soldier in the Napoleonic wars, and from thence to widow, only discover her irresponsible husband was a bigamist, so she doesn’t even have her in laws to fall back on. Allen captures a great deal of the restrictive feeling of the era without glorifying it, as a penniless and morally dubious widow, trying to get back home provides the hook to match her with the hero, Ross. All Meg wants is her sisters and avoiding starving to death, and we first meet our heroine looking to work to earn passage across the channel. All Ross wants to do is come to terms with his secret guilt and recover from a serious case of privilege guilt on top of mild PTSD.