Emily Fox-Seton

Reviews and more on my blog, Entering the Enchanted Castle I started reading this because I couldn't sleep one night, and then I had to keep going to the end. An odd mixture of comedy of manners, thriller, melodrama, and sentimental romance, veering wildly through various emotional trajectories. I think it would have been more successful if it had stuck more to just one or two sorts of stories; as it is, we are just settling into one when we get taken off in another direction; just after the most gooey sentimental bit, we get a grim, cynical ending as a chaser. Maybe Burnett was making fun of her own genre-writing formulas somehow? Also, very class-conscious and snobby, but that's Burnett for you. In some ways reminiscent of a grown-up A Little Princess, but with a heroine who is much more ordinary than Sara, almost stupid, and notable mainly for her slavish devotion to the man who rescues her from a life of poverty. I remember being disappointed the first time I read it, and so it was again.