Title: A
Detestable Name
Author: Arabella Brown
Publication Date: November 10th 2020
Print Length: 302 pages
Genre:
Chaste Regency Romance
~
Pitchforked
into the title by his brother’s death, the new Lord Newsam arrives
at the grim family home in Yorkshire to face daunting challenges. His
peevish, self-absorbed mother despises him. The servants are
insubordinate. He hardly knows his sisters, for whom he’s expected
to find husbands. The estate is ill-run and unprofitable, and the
bailiff obstructive. And in the midst of all this, he must find a
wife for himself – but the only woman he wants won’t have him.
To
widowed, impoverished Mary Thorpe, the very name of Newsam is
detestable: his brother drove her husband to suicide and made her a
social outcast. But Lord Newsam insists on rescuing her from penury.
The shocking realisation that she is falling in love with him in
spite of herself makes her situation even more complicated. How can
she let him ruin his own family’s reputation by marrying her? There
seems to be no solution – until every objection is swept away by a
ball nobody wants to attend and a startling discovery on their
return.
Although
she now lives in the U.K., Arabella Brown grew up in a small U.S.
town. She spent most of her youth in the local Carnegie Public
Library (thank you, Mr. Carnegie!), where she learned that intensive
reading does more to broaden your horizons than school does. She
still reads voraciously and her house is lined with thousands of
books. Despite her emphasis on meticulous research, it’s the plot
and the characters she particularly loves to create. She enjoys Jane
Austen’s and Georgette Heyer’s novels and wishes there were more
of them.
Under
another name, Ms Brown has published a number of novels set in
periods ranging from the 12th century to the 1960’s. This is her
first Regency.
I live in a Victorian semi-detached “bungalow” (one story) gentleman’s residence. It was built facing a lane which no longer exists – it was blocked off long before we came – so the only access is from the back, via a narrow lane nobody knows about, a lane only one car wide – with no sidewalks! We have two-fifths of an acre, a huge garden by city standards, much of it a south-facing slope. Everything grows in it luxuriantly – especially the weeds. If you’ve ever read Betty McDonald’s “Onions in the Stew” – that’s what my garden aspires to. My old garden was 1/17th of an acre, heavily shaded, and grew moss, mold, mildew and mud, so coping with this sunny Eden is a little intimidating! No, I can’t do it myself. I do have to have gardeners. Energetic ones.
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