Mills & Boon, £4.99, ISBN 978-0-263-91736-9
Historical Romance, 2016
The best way I can describe Virginia Heath’s The Discerning Gentleman’s Guide is Meghan Markle visiting 19th-century upper class England and finding it wanting because it’s not up to her so-called American standards.
The guide in the title refers to The Discerning Gentleman’s Guide to Selecting the Perfect Bride, written by Bennett Montague, the 16th Duke of Aveley. Now, I don’t know why anyone would want to read a wife-picking guide by a man that is still single, but maybe these people are sorely in need of something, anything to read.
This puts Bennett in the hate list of Amelia Mansfield, companion to his aunt. When her employer visits Bennett, our companion wastes little time screeching at the duke, calling him evil and denouncing him as the devil incarnate because he believes in taxing people in order to use the money to build better social service facilities for the people in the country.
Amelia, when left to her own devices later, decides that maybe she’s gone too far, but this momentary sobriety is just that—momentary. Soon, she descends onto the hero and the poor people in the neighborhood, passing judgment on all and sundry as morally lacking and all without bothering to know these people better. At one point, she even reads aloud the screes of Edward Poole, daring and courageous because she knows the man she hates, Bennett, is nearby to save her from any riot that her antics will cause.
That’s the biggest problem of this thing: the imbecile Amelia. My god, she is so sanctimonious, insufferable, rude, and awful to everyone, even the few people she claims to like, and every single thought that crosses her head is uncharitable and unkind. For someone that claims to champion the downtrodden, she is fast to judge other women in the lower classes as wanting when these women do not conform to her made-up ideal of how a virtuous woman should live.
Amelia is really stupid. She screeches about how wrong everything is, but offers no solutions because she is the one that is wrong. For example, her idea of the root cause of the high number of unwanted pregnancies and abandoned children among the lower class is men being assholes, like her father, and not being responsible enough to stick with the women they promised to love and cherish. Yes, every case is a projection of her own daddy issues—this imbecile has no idea what real life is like and hence is as out of touch as she claims the upper class folks are.
Furthermore, it’s bizarre how she hates Bennett for being rational when it comes to choosing a wife, and yet she rails about feckless men that play fast and loose with women’s hearts and lives. Won’t his approach actually lead to a marriage that is based on pragmatic interests and hence is less likely to be volatile like her parents’, whom she claims to have married for love?
Amelia is also a hypocrite. She is the daughter of a nobleman that annulled his marriage and abandoned his wife and daughter when the wife failed to provide him with a son, but she is soon hired by a very tolerant noble woman, is given all the nice things no average working class can dream of having as a result, and yet, she still claims to hate the nobility because of how oppressive they are to her. She claims to detest Bennett, but is horny for him because he is hot, rich, and titled. There is a nice guy here that she gets along well, but he is old and portly, eeuw, so no, only the “hateful” duke will do.
Finally, after all her big talk about how American standards are better, how taxation is evil, how all poor people should be given a billion pounds just because, and how all men are evil, she refuses to marry Bennett because she feels that he deserves a high class “suitable” wife that will help him become Prime Minister one day. Wait, so she thinks so little of the aristocracy, and how she is superior to them because she had been poor for like five seconds and hence she is now the sage of social justice, but when it comes to marrying her supposed true love, then all of a sudden, she is not good enough?
Oh, and it gets even better: in the end, all of Amelia’s so-called social justice drive is just daddy issues in action. Once she realizes that her daddy isn’t what that man seems to be, she’s more than happy to embrace the trapping of nobility.
In other words, Amelia Mansfield is a vile and unlikable sanctimonious prig that has no idea what she is screeching about, is rude and unsporting to anyone that challenges her vapid opinions, and yet, at the end of the day, she is an insufferable ignorant compost heap and a hypocrite to boot.
Bennett is a nice hero, and a reformer to boot. Yes, Amelia is wrong about him too. It’s just too bad that his so-called discernment completely fails him when it comes to that indescribably vile, stupid, screechy thing that he is shackling his testicles to. God help him and have mercy on his soul.
