I grabbed this book by Ellen Wood from my library on impulse after someone mentioned it in one of my Facebook groups. I had never heard of it or the author, but apparently it was a bestseller when it was first published in 1861, and I’m so glad I checked it out!
I’m going to spoil everything in this review, so if you want to check out this book and not know what’s coming, I suggest you stop reading now and come back after you’ve finished the book.
This book has so much going on I don’t even know where to begin. An earl’s daughter is left penniless when her father dies, leaving behind a mountain of debt. She ends up marrying the first man who proposes to her, an attorney named Archibald Carlyle who’s done very well for himself and was struck by her beauty when he first met her and can’t resist playing white knight to her damsel in distress. She doesn’t love him when they first marry, and I’m not even sure he loves her at first, so much as he feels sorry for her. But she recognizes he’s a good guy and will treat her right and the love between them grows in the course of their marriage.
But Barbara Hare, a local gentlewoman and daughter of a local justice, has always had the hots for Carlyle and thought he was going to propose to her.
Meanwhile, Barbara’s brother, Richard Hare Jr., was convicted of murder about five years before the book begins, but since he took off right after the murder and no one knows where he is, they can’t track him down to execute him. He comes back in disguise in the dead of night to explain to Barbara what happened, insist he’s innocent, and enlist her help in tracking down the real murderer, who went by an assumed name, making it difficult to track him down.
Barbara enlists Carlyle’s help in proving her brother’s case, and because they don’t want anyone to know they’re meeting with a convicted murder, they have to keep things on the DL, meaning Barbara and Carlyle spend a lot of time alone together talking in low voices, and sometimes meeting late at night, which is awfully suspicious. Knowing Barbara has always held a torch for her husband, it doesn’t take much for Mrs. Carlyle (a.k.a. Lady Isabel) to become convinced that her husband is carrying on an affair. When a visitor from her past tells her she should get revenge on her husband by running off with him, she thoughtlessly agrees, leaving her three children behind with her husband.
She thinks she and this other guy will get married once her husband divorces her, but of course he has no such intention, and once he comes into his inheritance, he abandons her and the child they’ve had together.
Some time later, Lady Isabel is involved in a train accident that kills her child and leaves her mutilated. Word gets out that she was killed in the accident, and she decides everyone is better off thinking she’s dead and she can start a new life as a French governess going by Madame Vine. She also makes sure to keep herself pretty well covered at all times, including her face and eyes, so if she should chance upon anyone from her former life, there will be no chance they’ll recognize her.
When she hears news of her three children back home in England, and that one of them might be dying, and that there’s an opening for a governess in the household and she can get a recommendation, she can’t resist going back to be with her children, even though her husband has since married Barbara Hare.
By the time you get to that point in the book, I think it’s pretty easy to tell where it was going to go from there, but I still enjoyed every minute spent reading this book. I think my favorite might have been the fact that some of the plotlines were so implausible that even the characters talk about how implausible they are.
If you’re looking for some escapist literature, I highly recommend this one.