REVIEW: Viscount in Love by Eloisa James
I have not regularly read historical romance, for the past, oh, several years (probably more years than I realize, to be honest). My book log shows that I read eight historical romances in 2020 (this once would have been a paltry number), and since then I’ve only read one or two a year; this reading has consisted entirely of one series by Julie Ann Long.
So, I started Viscount in Love with a little trepidation – would the issues that drove me away from a subgenre that I once loved rise up to annoy me again?
Unfortunately, the answer was yes.
The book opens at a ball, where Victoria Sutton, in her first season, is talking to her friend Clara. She’s making fun of her sister Leonora’s fiance, Viscount Dominic Kelbourne, who they are watching from across the room. The viscount, in Torie’s opinion, is “haughty—and bad-tempered.” We also immediately hear about his “volatile” Italian mistress, the mention of which feels anachronistic between two tender-aged debutantes, though I’m somewhat inured to that sort of thing in historical romance. Would that I were inured to “volatile” Italian mistresses; they seem to be the only type of mistress any of these manly historical romance heroes keep (to be fair, occasionally they are fiery Spanish mistresses rather than volatile Italian ones).
Dom catches them, naturally. Torie and Dom then verbally spar until supper is called, at which point Leonora shows up, outs the fact that Torie is dyslexic (they never call it that in the book, of course, just emphasize that she can’t read or write), and stalks off with her fiancé. Torie thinks the two deserve each other because they are both so cold. But which is Dom – cold or hot-tempered? And Leonora is portrayed as very proper, but would a proper lady blurt out her sister’s embarrassing “affliction” to her fiancé in a public place?
Inconsistent characterization – mostly of Dom but also a few other characters, chiefly Leonora, was one of my main issues with Viscount in Love. More on that in a bit.
The story shifts forward two years, to the funeral of Dom’s sister and brother-in-law, felled by that most common historical romance calamity, a carriage accident. Torie and Leonora (the latter still a fiancée rather than a bride) are in attendance.
Dom was not close to his sister but felt an affinity to her for having suffered under their terrible father, and Dom wants to do right by his orphaned twin niece and nephew, Florence and Valentine. Leonora is immediately haughtily appalled by the idea of having anything to do with children who are rumored to be illegitimate (Dom’s sister was apparently known to get around).
Torie, on the other hand, immediately bonds with Florence and Val, who are the most precocious 11-year-olds in the land. In fact, the three become such great friends that she takes to visiting them in their London home daily, teaching them painting (Torie is an accomplished artist).
Through these visits, Dom and Torie start to interact more. While they are like oil in water in some respects (him, forbidding and proper; her, daffy and frivolous), they do begin to find common ground in their care for Val and Florence. Thankfully, at this point there’s not *too* much mental lusting. I’m not a big fan of mental lusting in general in romance, and even less so in a story where the hero is engaged to the heroine’s sister.
It isn’t probably a spoiler that the engagement ends, which leaves the door open for Dom and Torie. The course of true love doesn’t run smooth, predictably.
So, as noted previously, one of my main issues with Viscount in Love was inconsistent characterization. Torie was fairly consistent, but I found Dom hard to get a handle on. I thought he was supposed to be a stick-up-the-you-know-what type of aristocrat, which made his engagement to the icy Leonora logical. But then one of his main characteristics is supposedly a bad temper. I didn’t feel like I saw the bad temper much, but it gets talked about a lot.
Primarily he seems to yell a bunch in the House of Lords, about slavery (he’s opposed). So he’s…kind of overly proper and kind of fiery, but the two halves never quite made sense together. Later in the book, he becomes less proper and uptight, which may have made sense in the context of his blossoming relationship with Torie. But it highlighted the fact that I really didn’t understand who Dom was. He had an unhappy childhood and hated his father. But he didn’t have the sort of trajectory that I like to see in historical romance heroes and heroines, where they grow in the course of the story and to some degree are healed by love (that latter of which I DO NOT believe in in real life – don’t try this at home, kids). The abusive father storyline just sort of fizzled out.
Leonora was also inconsistent. She’s thought of by Torie as being incredibly proper and even demure (or at least she pretends to be around Dom, supposedly). But in her scenes with Dom she comes off as a strong-willed snob. She’s so unpleasant it’s hard to understand Dom’s feelings about marrying her. He seems resigned to it, noting at one point that a gentleman would never break an engagement. But I wanted to understand what drew him to her in the first place and get a sense of how he came to understand they weren’t suited. A lot of the Dom/Leonora relationship feels like it was entirely engineered by Leonora and Dom was just along for the ride, which doesn’t make him seem like a strong hero.
In general Viscount in Love felt pretty History Lite to me – the characters and relationships (those precocious twins!) felt anachronistic and unrealistic. (I even side-eyed Torie as a nickname for Victoria; I would think Vicki would be more common. I don’t actually know, and I know authors get annoyed when readers assume something is anachronistic when they don’t actually know, but here we are. When I lose trust in a narrative, all bets are off.)
It’s not all bad – the book got more absorbing as the story went on, and the relationship that grew between Dom and Torie was actually quite sweet. I liked seeing Torie come into her own surrounded for once by people who didn’t think she was stupid because she was dyslexic. (In addition to being a talented painter, it’s suggested that Torie possesses and eidetic memory.)
It just so happens that I have a particular set of complaints against historical romance at this point, and this book pinged my radar on many of them. I’m giving Viscount in Love a straight C.
Best,
Jennie
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I liked this book better than you did, however the twist near the end about Torie’s art bothered me. I felt like she was accomplished enough and completely warm and loving that she didn’t need the additional boost.
Actually in Australia/Britain Tory/Torie/Tori is equally as likely as Vicki as a diminutive for Victoria.
I liked this book better than you. I think I’m so relieved to have an actual romance, and not to have a crusader with an issue jammed down my throat that I enjoyed it. I’ve enjoyed her last few releases more but I’m not sad to have spent the money and the hours.
@Mary Beth: I agree.
@Bronte: I don’t have a problem with Tori in the modern context; I just wasn’t sure if was something that was used in 1800ish.
I noticed the surprisingly high number of carriage accidents as a way to get rid of inconvenient relatives during my first year of reading historical romance. I’ve always wondered how common carriage accidents were in real life at the time, but not enough to do any research on it.
@Kris Bock: I have a book called Carriages at Eight that contends they were not uncommon at all and the roads were considered somewhat hazardous. I’ll see if I can find the quote later. Nevertheless, I understand readers wanting something different.
As a writer though I find it hard to come up with anything else when a sudden death of a young, healthy person is needed. There’s drowning but what if it doesn’t fit the character not to know how to swim, or if more than one person needs to die at once? There’s consumption and such but that brings so much baggage and trauma with it that might not fit the story.
Most recently I used a ship’s boiler explosion to kill off two members of the same family at once. But I still resorted to a carriage accident for another character… I would welcome suggestions of other types of not-protracted deaths for young and healthy people. I mean that seriously! Shoot some suggestions my way, I would be so grateful.
@Janine: I seem to remember a bee sting was the cause of death for the Bridgerton father. A food allergy or choking might be another cause of death.
@Janine: In one of the Dinah Dean Russian Regencies, a noblewoman tripped on the train of her ballgown and fell backwards down some stairs.
@Janine: Or someone could be thrown from a horse.
@Kris Bock: I wonder if carriage accidents were common but fatal carriage accidents, not so much? I’m not sure what speed the various types of conveyances got up to, though.
@Janine: I would think house fires and contagious diseases, maybe? I feel like people randomly died of the latter a lot up until the 20th century (and of course depending on time and place, much later). Those are things where you can get rid of a couple of family members in short order. Something like scarlet fever.
@Kareni: Who was the nobleman involved in the King Tut discovery who got a mosquito bite on his face and then cut it while shaving and died of blood poisoning? People could die in the most bizarre, random ways (they still do today, but it’s usually different, bizarre random ways).
@Jayne: I remember reading a contemporary suspense book in the past year or two where someone killed another person by throwing them down some stairs, and it seemed like an awfully iffy method for a planned killing. But for a random accident, I can see it happening, especially with old-fashioned gowns with tons of material!
Choking on food. Tripping on a rock or other object and banging head in exactly the wrong (temple) space. Aortic dissection (first identified in 1760 per Google). Wind storm causing large tree branch to crash on top of person, house, or vehicle. Rip tide (are there rip tides on English shores?). Brain aneurysm. Collapsed lung or broken rib and punctured lung. I’m having too much fun with this.
@LML: We are a bloodthirsty lot, aren’t we. ☺
@Kareni: Yeah, I had someone choke on a fishbone in an earlier draft of my current manuscript (I later edited out the character so it’s not there anymore).
@Kareni: I did that once too, the character was drunk. That part of the story also had to go, but I remember getting a comment from a reader that people almost never fall down stairs to their deaths and it therefore seemed contrived to them.
I like the idea of someone getting thrown from a horse. It would probably have to happen in the countryside but it’s very doable.
@Jennie: Yeah, I think I mentioned consumption in my earlier comment. That’s what they called tuberculosis then. But like I said in the earlier comment, it brings a lot of baggage and trauma for the character who lost that loved one, beyond just the fact that they died. The infection and caring for them vs. staying away, etc. It could definitely aid storytelling in some stories but there are many times when you want just a quick, one or two sentence mention death. I have used childbed fever (now called purpureal fever) as well as placenta displacement to kill a couple of mothers shortly after giving birth.
A house fire has some of the same trauma issues if it’s a family member of the protagonist, but it is quicker. I wanted to have a schoolhouse fire (for rescue heroics, I wasn’t going to kill off the kids) because of a badly cleaned chimney once but apparently they were cleaned very regularly and assiduously and it didn’t seem plausible that a school chimney in particular would have been neglected. Then I tried to turn it into a windmill fire (those were quite common apparently, because the flour made windmill interiors very dry) but it was prohibitive to research and ultimately I got rid of that whole plot point (after buying six or seven books on windmills that I may never use).
@Jennie: Yes, but if you read that in a book, would you buy it? Random deaths are very hard to sell readers on because a book has to be more believable, hence the saying that “truth is stranger than fiction.” I remember that in one of Laura Kinsale’s books the villain died by drowning but in a very unexpected way. One minute he was there, the next he slipped and fell and was dead. Happens in real life but readers complained that it was too random. I don’t agree in that case because I felt he had to be killed by a force of nature because he was a force of nature himself. But when a character can be killed by more believable means, I prefer to go the easier to buy route.
@LML: I really like some of those, esp the wind storm and a botched medical procedure. I liked the punctured lung but there would need to be a reason why it got punctured–the reason is what I’m looking for. Brain aneurysm — do they happen to younger people? I have killed off a character with a heart attack and another with breast cancer but they were not that young. Young, healthy people who die suddenly are harder to pull off.
Boy, I’m realizing I’ve killed a lot of characters!
I think falling off a horse is often a way of killing off men in HR. Often he’s drunk or trying to jump a too high fence for a bet or simply careless – usually these are the unwanted first husbands who leave their widows untrusting of men, including the hero when he first appears.
@Kris Bock: Okay, the promised quotes from Carriages at Eight by Frank E. Huggett. There is a whole chapter called “Perils of the Roads” with more information about horse manure and dust than I ever wanted to know.
CONTENT WARNING: Violent deaths and animal deaths.
Here’s some of what he imparts about carriage accidents:
“A sudden shower brought horses to their knees or to the ground by their dozen. [A survey] conducted on fifty working days in 1872 […] found that, on average, a horse could only travel 191 miles on asphalt, 132 miles on granite setts, and 330 miles on wooden blocks before it fell.”
[Here there’s more about the agonies of dying horses and crowds forming around them.]
Then:
“Ice and snow always resulted in a large crop of serious accidents, even though the horses’ shoes were rough nailed and soft soap was applied to prevent snow from balling; and there were many calls on the services of the horse ambulances which were used to remove a dead or maimed horse from the city streets.
Fog, those old-time pea-soupers in which drivers could not see the horses at the end of their reins and street arabs [forgive this book, it was published in 1979] with flaring torches guided pedestrians home for a few pence, often brought traffic in the towns to a complete standstill. Night-time driving was always full of perils, particularly in the countryside, as the road was only faintly illuminated by the weak glow of wax or composition candles in a pair of carriage lamps. Colza oil lamps gave a brighter light but also produced an abominable smell so that they were rarely used in private carriages. As a consequence, the state of the moon tended to govern night-time social life in the countryside, with dinner parties being held, whenever possible, when the moon was full.”
Lots of details on road regulations and non-regulation controversies, as well as on traffic congestion. Then:
“It was, indeed, almost as dangerous to walk or to drive in Victorian city streets as it is today. In London, after allowance had been made for the increase in population, almost as many people were seriously injured in road accidents in 1872 as in 1972 and there were about half the number of deaths. As the Victorians did not go out nearly as much as people do today — hundreds of thousands maidservants, for example, were confined to their houses week after week with only one short evening break every seven days — the real accident rate per road-user may have been even higher. In addition, there was widespread carnage among horses. In bad weather, the streets resembled a knacker’s yard more than a public thoroughfare: during the severe snowstorms in London in 1886, forty-nine horses died and another thousand were injured.”
“People were crushed to death between carriage wheels; the pole of the vehicle broke through the back panels of a carriage injuring or killing some of the passengers; women hurled themselves screaming from their carriages as horses bolted.”
More here about someone seeing a runaway horse being steered into iron railings with grusome results and police walking at regulation speed of 2.5 miles an hour along the curbside so they could intervene quickly to stop runaway horses.
“Even in the wealthiest and best regulated families, the chances of being injured from a road accident were very high. The Queen herself was involved in a number of accidents.”
There’s also some info about how insurance wasn’t mandatory and people were almost never charged and/or fined even for causing major accidents.
I hope this didn’t bore you all! I geek out on this kind of stuff but I know not everyone does. TL;DR Victorian roads were dangerous indeed.
If your books are set in the 19th century, sadly there are tons of things besides carriage accidents that could kill a younger person- one main thing to consider is this is before antibiotics so infection was a major killer. I agree tuberculosis might not suit most plots but people died of diseases like strep throat, bronchitis, and scarlet fever. Flu and pneumonia also killed (and still do) but they used to die in much higher numbers. This is also before most vaccines so you have diseases like measles, mumps, etc. Another big one is appendicitis- surgery before the late 19th century was almost as dangerous as the underlying issue. Diabetes was also a death sentence (until I think about 1920/30). There are also various head injuries. If anyone is interested in reading about surgery in the 19th century, I highly recommend The Butchering Art by Lindsey Fitzharris. It’s nonfiction but reads like fiction. It’s fascinating reading – and made me very glad to be born in the 1970s!
@Janine: I didn’t buy it in the book I read! It just seemed too arbitrary, unless someone has really brittle bones.
@Janine: Interesting stuff – thank you!
@Bookfan: Thanks! I have used a number of medical things and you’re absolutely right that it wasn’t hard to die of them. In fact I wonder if one of the reasons carriage accidents are so common in books (in addition to thoughtless regurgitation of cliches), is that it’s the kind of death that doesn’t make readers think about how dangerous it was to live in the 19th C and what kind of dangers their characters may face in their supposed-to-be-HEA future. That the roads were equally unsafe tends not to occur to us when we read because carriages and horses seem so quaint and harmless now that there are few of them and we can see them from inside a car.
But yes, your point is well taken. My great-grandmother died in the 1900s or 1910s from a lack of antibiotics after surgery. I can’t recall if it was an appendectomy or something else, but it was a minor something that would not have killed her had the surgery taken place after penicillin was invented. She was only in her forties.
I have looked at The Butchering Art but I’m scared to read it! One reason I’m glad my books are set in the 1890s is that it wasn’t quite that level of awful by then, and I also don’t have to think about life before toothpaste.
@Susan/DC: Yes, good point. A nice way to punish a somewhat villainous character that needs to be offed off page.
@Janine: Kaetrin listened to the audiobook of “The Butchering Art” and liked it.
https://dearauthor.com/need-a-rec/kaetrins-best-of-2022/
@Jayne: I remember. It’s the title that scares me off. Plus I’m vegan and even butchering animals is hard for me to think about.
Well, this thread took a funny turn (pun intended). My first thought about period-appropriate deaths for young people was infection. People died at the drop of a hat in the 19th century due to minor cuts or getting caught in bad weather. To a lot of modern readers these kinds of deaths might seem implausible and maybe that’s why carriage accidents became so common on the page.
But don’t worry, romance authors – with the overprescription of antibiotics and the rise of superbugs we are already reversing the gains of the post-penicillin era and people today are dying of infections that would have been treatable thirty years ago. So it might become easier to kill off previously healthy characters without risking the reader rolling their eyes in disbelief.
@oceanjasper: I’ve been thinking about why I haven’t come across many mentions of death by infection from minor things in my research and concluded that it’s partly because my manuscripts are set in the 1890s, well after disinfectants became commonly used, but it may also be because it was so known about and accepted that it didn’t need to be mentioned.
And re superbugs, yes, it’s very scary. In addition to overprescription of antibiotics, products like like antibacterial soap also have a lot to answer for. I wish the government would start a national public awareness campaign but I doubt there ever will be (in the US, which is where I live).