Monday, January 24, 2022

A Rogue of One's Own by Evie Dunmore

Bringing Down the Duke


A Rogue of One's Own is Evie Dunmore's follow-up to Bringing Down the Duke. I raved about Bringing Down the Duke, going so far as to say "I adored this book," so expectations were high for this one. Let's see if it met expectations, shall we?

Interesting characters: Tristan is the second son of a horribly abusive aristocratic family. One of his joys in life had been going to visit his mother's friends during the summer and meeting Lady Lucie. When they get older, Tristan's older brother has died and he has become his father's heir.  Lucie is a suffragette, working hard to get the Married Women's Property Act amended to allow women to keep property when they got married. Lucie has a trust from her aunt and so she is relatively independent and she'd like to keep it that way, so marriage is definitely off the table for her.

Tristan is the least-developed male lead I've read in a while. He earned a Victoria Cross, but we never hear anything about his time in war, except for a very brief pillow talk discussion. It's more of the same daddy issues that historical romances like to use (and I, for my part, don't want any more of it).  He's bored, he's trying to free himself from the shackles of his father, and he's dull as anything.

Lucie is such a "not like other girls" that she made me want to scream. If a woman wasn't inside her core group, Lucie describes them in negative ways every time. Look, it's not a mark of honor to dislike other women - as a matter of fact, if you dislike them, you're probably doing something wrong. I think Lucie's dedication to the suffragette movement is super interesting, but she comes across as selfish because it doesn't seem like she cares about other women, but really wants this law to change because it will benefit her. There are even times when Dunmore writes a scene to make us think Lucie is okay, like how she helped a prostituted woman keep her child, but even that scene undermines Lucie because as Lucie is giving the woman a coin to help her out, Lucie is actually imagining all the things she was giving up buying.  

Believable conflict: This is really what I'm enjoying about the series. I absolutely love the idea of romance novels set in a suffragette community. The idea that women who were fighting for their rights would end up with men who would support them is swoonily romantic to me.  I do think Lucie would fight against getting married, even if she did fall in love, so I think this plot of Tristan needs an heir, but Lucie won't get married seems plausible in the setting presented.

Emotional tension: I guess?  Hm. I'm struggling with this because I honestly thought they'd both be okay either on their own or with someone else. I never really understood why Lucie wanted to be with this vanilla chump and I'm not sure why Tristan would want to be with someone as sharp and acerbic as Lucie.  

(Note: There is a plot point about Tristan giving her a cat, a cat who is simply all over the book. I found this incredibly sweet and charming and I think I would probably have forgiven him many sins for this gift and so I find it less puzzling why Lucie eventually gave in to his charms than vice versa.)

Happily ever after: They're living in sin, engaged until the Married Women's Property Act is amended, and basically have to hide their relationship.  Is that happy?

4/5 stars

Lines of Note:

"She was not just left on the shelf, she was the shelf, and there was not a single gentlemen in England interested in her offerings. Admittedly, her offerings were meager. Her reception room hosted a printing press and her life revolved around the Cause and a demanding cat." (page 11)

I read this just as my cat had been yowling for the better part of an hour for dinner.. Demanding pets rule my life, too.

"But at the end of the day, it was a drop into a bottomless barrel. Even if she were to go in rags, there would always be more women and more babies needing money, needing shelter. The caravan of misery was endless." (page 73)

I think this is part of the author trying to convince us that Lucie is aware of the world and she's thoughtful, but a bit down-trodden. Instead, she just comes off as selfish and whinging.

"She'd expect regular husbandly things from him: pretty children, being kept in the fashion to which she was accustomed, compliments. She wasn't delicate, but she looked malleable as butter and was trained to please her husband." (page 165)

This is actually from Tristan's POV, but it goes to show how Dunmore characterizes women who are not the main character in this book. Shameful.

"It could as well have been the moon, and was about just as far removed from Britain, as a month of travel lies between our shores. All of Afghanistan could have vanished from the earth, with not Englishman any wiser back in London, and vice versa. Instead, we take the trouble to voyage there, since they never came to us and never shall, and the natives starve and are butchered, and I had to bury good English men in foreign soil. All because of an expansionist Tory manifesto Disraeli drew up in a fit of personal ambition." (page 298)

This is all Tristan ever talks about the war. Never about his buddies he lost. Never a flashback about a battle. Never meeting up with a guy he knows from the Army. Never another thought or word about the war. Very strange character development.

""...oh, to have the luxury of male ignorance...The difference between wife and lover is like night and day," she said, hating that he was following her again.. "Name one married woman, just one, who advanced important causes outside the home."" (page 374)

This is Lucie's main point throughout the book and I'm hard-pressed to disagree with her, to be honest.

Things I Looked Up:

When were pugs bred?  Pugs are an ancient breed, and have roots dating back to 400 BC. When Lucie makes a comment to her cat about getting a pug, it is historically accurate. (page 32)

Contagious Diseases Act: First passed in 1864, extended in 1866 and 1869, and repealed in 1886. Made it the law for women suspected of prostitution to register with the police and submit to an invasive medication examination in order to reduce the prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases in military men. Police had the power to decide who was a prostitute and if a woman refused to submit to an exam, she could be sentence to three months in prison or hard labor. Obviously, some officers took advantage of this power and women were treated poorly. It was eventually repealed after a grassroots effort led by Josephine Butler. (page 109)

The following is a list of women Tristan provided Lucie in an effort to persuade her that married women could still engage in politics. I provided a bit on each woman and their husbands. I'm not entirely sure I'm sold on these as being paragons of marriage, but you decide.(page 398)

Mary Wollstonecraft - A founding feminist philosopher who wrote everything from novels to a history of the French Revolution. For our purposes, she is most notable for writing A Vindication on the Rights of Women, which argued women should be educated to match their position in society because they raise children and need to be respected "companions" to their husbands. She also argued that women are people and deserve fundamental rights. Hers isn't the greatest love story since she tried to commit suicide after the father of her first child left her and she was married to William Godwin for five months before she died post-childbirth. 

Mary Shelley - Daughter of Wollstonecraft who died less than a month after giving birth to her. She famously wrote Frankenstein. Her love story is slightly better than her mother's (I guess). She met Percy Bysshe Shelley when he was already married, but they had an affair and she became pregnant with a child who died after being born prematurely.  She married Shelley in 1816 after his first wife committed suicide and they remained (rather unhappily, it seems) married until he died in a sailing accident in 1822. Also, not the greatest love story.

Ada Lovelace - The world's first computer programmer. She was also the child of the poet Lord Byron and the mathematician Lady Byron. She was married to William King-Noel, 1st Earl of Lovelace, but had many extramarital affairs and seems to have excited scandal wherever she went.

Mary Somerville - A Scottish scientist, writer, and polymath. She was one of the first Honorary Members of the Royal Astronomical Society. She was first married to Samuel Greig, but theirs was not a happy marriage, what with him thinking women did not have the capacity to pursue academic interests. Fortunately for her, he died very soon after their marriage and then she married William Somerville, which seems to have been a happy enough relationship.

Harriet Taylor Mill - Famous women's right advocate. She was married to her first husband, John Taylor, when she first met John Stuart Mill, but after he died, they married. Mill was a famous suffragist, writing a number of famous early feminist tracts, including The Subjugation of Women.

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson - First British woman to qualify as a physician and surgeon. She was happily married for many years and was able to keep her medical practice the entire time, even as she raised three children.

Millicent Fawcett - A British suffragist. She was married to Henry Fawcett, a blind Liberal Member of Parliament who relied on Millicent as his secretary. She had a writing career, while caring for Henry and raising their son.

In the end, while this book's characters didn't really do it for me, the whole setting of romance amidst the fight for women to get the right to vote really does do it for me. The historical details Dunmore adds are so cleverly woven into the fabric of the story that you don't even realize you're getting a mini-history lesson.  Her ability to synthesize story with fact is superb.  So while this particular book was not a home run for me, there were elements that made me super happy and I'll definitely read the rest of the books in this series.

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