Page 42 of An Offer for a Spinster
“No novel has ever infuriated me like that one. The character herself – poor, sweet Pamela, little more than a child – was nice enough, but the hero and villain, all rolled into one…” she shuddered. “Ugh.”
He winced, glancing back down at the novel.
The story of Pamela had been all anyone could talk about. The story starts with a young – very young – and beautiful young woman, Pamela, working as a maid in a wealthy and dissolute man’s house, after the death of his mother, her employer. The man took a liking to Pamela, but what started as a sweet, awkward romance quickly spiraled into something terrible.
Refusing to become the man’s mistress, Pamela tries to protect her virtue as strongly as the so-called hero tries to take it. He tries to trick her, imprison her, and even assault her, and only luck and well-timed swoons saved her, time and again.
“It was difficult to read,” Lady Katherine stated, after a while. “When I first read it, I expected Pamela to make her escape and return home, or else find a savior somewhere else. Imagine my shock when she reveals she’d loved him all this time, and agrees to become his wife.”
“Spoilers,” he remarked dryly.
“Oh, come, I simply don’t want you to be blindsided. And then their engagement – oh, I don’t want to talk about it. I was never so angry at a novel in my life. I threw it across the room. And then, all my friends were talking about how romantic it was, how virtuous she was, and so on. As if marrying that brute was meant to be her reward.”
“I suspect it was.”
“Are yousureyou want to read Pamela? I have a few more novels to recommend, if you would appreciate a heroine with a more spirited demeanour.”
“I think it has to be this one,” Timothy responded sadly. This was the novel pointed out to him by his publisher, and Mr. Hawthorne was already running out of patience with him. “What book do you have there?”
Lady Katherine hesitated, just for a moment, then showed him.
Timothy flinched. The book was a small, red-bound volume, with a familiar title on the front, a single name.
“Thomasin,” he read aloud. “That’s one of L. Sterling’s earliest works. Very unpopular, I recall.”
“Not unpopular, just little-known. It’s a quiet sort of book, without the terrifying scenes and villains of the later books.”
“Do… do you prefer those scenes to the quiet ones?”
She chuckled. “That depends entirely what mood I’m in. This is one thing I love about the author – they can write soft, gentle stories, and nerve-wracking tense ones, but their style and integrity never falters. That’s a rare thing to find in anauthor these days. Even Shakespeare wrote the kind of plays audiences wanted to see, and one has to wonder how much of his artistic integrity was sacrificed to that.”
“Goodness, you seem to understand these matters very well,” Timothy laughed, thinking of his editor and endless, loud meetings in which he was begged to alter his stories to appeal more to ‘audiences’, although these audiences were never exactly identified.
“And what is that supposed to mean?” she retorted, laughing.
“It means that you ought to write stories of your own, Lady Katherine. Have you ever thought of becoming an author?”
She shrugged, flicking through the pages ofThomasin. “I’m sure I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“Nonsense. Somebody who reads as much as you do would write a remarkable story, I’m sure of it.”
“I’m gladyou’resure of it. You know how publishers baulk at a woman writing fiction. Or non-fiction, for that matter.”
Or a man writing novels.
“Use a pseudonym,” he suggested. “Most famous authors do.”
“Like this one?” Lady Katherine said, holding upThomasin. “Everybody knows that L. Sterling is a pseudonym. We’re split between thinking that the author is female and male.”
“And which do you believe?”
“I think the author is female. Or perhaps I’d simply like to believe that. And you?”
“Male, I think. But of course, I don’t know anything about it.”
“Did you ever meet an author you admired?” Katherine asked, turning to the moth-eaten flyleaf.
A prickle ran down his spine. “No, I don’t believe so. Why? Have you?”
