Thank you for doing my thinking for me!

Well, now I think I have the answer. Beyond Phillip’s snobbishness (and his dismaying inability to see it until it’s forcibly pointed out to him), beyond his harsh treatment of Maria (both as a young girl and as a working woman), it’s ALL ABOUT HIM. His wants, his needs, his feelings, his desires–secret and otherwise, his sense of duty, his position, his reputation, his pride, his so-called honor . . . for a little while, perhaps, it’s about Lawrence too, but Phillip seems to view his brother as an extension of himself. Even as a boy, he selfishly keeps Maria’s hair ribbon, despite knowing how upset she is over its loss because it belonged to her late mother. (At least when Roarke retained Eve’s button in “Naked in Death,” it came off an ugly suit that she didn’t care for.)

There must be scads of similarly self-centered heroes in romance, who become less so when they fall in love with the heroine. Unfortunately, I’m not sure Phillip ever matures sufficiently to really think about Maria and what she might want or need, even after she practically spells it out for him during his high-handed proposals. And for me, that’s a pretty big turn-off. It’s a testament to LLG’s writing ability that I didn’t hate Phillip completely, and, at times, I even felt a bit sorry for him. But that’s a far cry from sympathizing with or rooting for him.

Still can’t stand the last scene, with Phillip and Maria both doing inexplicable 180s, and all the complicated issues between them being handily swept under the rug. Because just saying “I love you” solves everything, doesn’t it? ( /sarcasm)

Secret Desires also seemed very short to me - shorter in page count and with a bigger font. This shortness seemed to contribute to the characterization problems.

I also read this right after Sherry Thomas’s Delicious, and I have to say the use of food and the heroine’s love of cooking was more sophisticated in that novel. This suffered in comparison, but I did like the authentic details about baking.

The tension within Marcus’s character follows a more direct trajectory — he is old fashioned in a way that does not fit his progressive ideas in another way, and so he adapts the old-fashioned part of himself to fit the rest of him. And IMO he was never really cruel to Lillian, and he never set out to harm her financially or in any other way. Also, we see him develop into the adoring, doting lover, the man we can trust has grown beyond the petty attitudes toward Lillian’s American directness and modernity. In other words, Marcus shows a character consistently I didn’t detect in Phillip, with a more coherent rendering of a similar personal inconsistency, if that makes any sense.

And Phillip had already turned to trade via the family shipping business, so his attitudes were particularly frustrating to me.

Becky: I don’t find Phillip confusing in the way I find a *person* whose motivations are opaque confusing. I find him more incoherent in the way of a character who is inexplicably inconsistent, if that makes any sense. Because when an author creates a character, she may create him as unself-conscious and conflicted, but IMO even (especially?) that kind of characterization needs to be coherent at a meta level, which Phillip wasn’t for me. In other words, he may not understand himself, but we need to understand him in order for his journey (and the relationship with the heroine) to make sense.

MCHalliday: One of the mitigating factors in Phillip’s relationship to Maria was the fact that they had really grown up together in the same household. So while there was a very real difference in social position from the start, Phillip’s attitudes toward Maria IMO smacked of that virgin/whore dichotomy that was so prevalent in the mid-Victorian period. So it wasn’t that I expected him to be fully ‘democratic’ in his social attitudes toward class, but that he treated Maria with dishonor, which, as you pointed out in your comment, would not be part of a gentleman’s code of behavior, especially a gentleman who had grown up with and been very close to Maria.

In 1895 England, things were changing a wee bit but there remained a huge chasm between the working class and the aristocracy, well into the twentieth century. If Maria had been respectably supported and not chosen to become a ’skilled worker’, Phillip would have had less apprehension inspite of his Victorian conventions. The Queen frowned upon working women and this was an accepted attitude for both middle and upper classes.

Janet indicated historical inaccuracies in her review and further to that, obtaining a leasehold in bustling Piccadilly would have been an incredible, if not near impossible, feat for woman without male represention. Also, manners and chivalry in the latter nineteenth century were important to an honourable gentleman; malicious words spoken to a woman of good virtue would have been viewed as horrendous. IMHO, Maria’s intelligence should have afforded the ability to see his lack of respect for her; independence and success should have ensured she kept away from such a man.