Description

from republished (1966) Harlequin back cover: Was Lindsay Varlon just an attractive scoundrel -- or Thea's best friend in a difficult world? Cousin Geraldine, the popular and beautiful actress, probably knew the answer, but she was not inclined to help her penniless young relative.

Then Stephen Dorley came on the scene, and Thea was able to see that ordinary, day-to-day niceness is better, after all, than exciting, but slightly dangerous uncertainty. Or is it?

Notes

Age-difference trope played up big here. She's almost 20 and he's 35...but 35 still seems kind of young to be "my child"-ing people, looking "rather past [your] first youth" and doing the disaffected rake routine. Right? I liked this one, though, almost against my will. The female MC is young, fresh, cheerful and resilient (if slightly clueless) and you can see why the male MC, fresh off being an RAF pilot, would find her so appealing. I wish Burchard had emphasized that war service more in motivating his disaffected world-weariness (versus the trials of being a celebrity and moving in the theatre crowd) but I've noticed that writers didn't necessarily like to go there in their light postwar fiction. The male MC, as will become typical in category romances of the 50s & 60s, is pretty opaque --we get nothing from his perspective and the heroine has no idea what's going on in his head: he's emotionally unreadable, "an enigma", to her. That said, Burchell has Thea give a very nice description early on of something she's noticed about Lin: "What's so extraordinary about him is that he's kind in an imaginative way. Lots of people are just kind -- in a haphazard, emotional way that gives them a nice feeling but doesn't cost them any brain work. But he seems able to put himself into the feelings of people entirely different from himself, think out what they will most need, and then go to some considerable trouble to supply it." You don't see that in many descriptions of category heroes. And another early scene finds him "standing in the sitting-room doorway, with his hands in his pockets...smiling as though the sight of Thea sitting on the ground with a large cat was a very pleasing one." Which, together, I'd argue, make him -- as Mills & Boon/Harlequin heroes go -- a keeper. Would love to see the 1945 dj, if anyone has one!

Mildly flaggish: Young Stephen introduces himself as "Sane, white and over twenty-one..." which, why?

Tags

1940s, English, Europe, England, accident, vehicular, car crash, age difference, beautiful/handsome, cheerful, determined, dominant, f/m, famous, female, hair, blond(e), hair, dark, marriage of convenience, opposites attract, poor, producer/director, protector, rake, rich, romance, second/third-act breakup, single, tall, third-person, unreadable to other MC, you're such a child!, young

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