More Farnol fluff; more varied in action than The Amateur Gentleman but not as extravagant in form as The Geste of Duke Jocelyn.
Hero Peregrine is neither big nor strong nor clever in the ways of the world, but goes a long way on being a nice man and a gentleman. He's remarkably unstuffy for a gentleman of the period, willing not only to live with a tinker but to marry an orphan raised by the Zingari. She's not so feeble as Farnol's upper-class heroines; teaches him knife-fighting, steals them dinner; I think she's taller than he is when they meet. By the end of the novel she's been adopted by a lord and given all the polish of one who sings for the Crowned Heads of Europe, etc etc. (It is escapist fiction.) Peregrine wrestled his angel and virtuously lost when he encouraged her to follow her education before marriage, surrendering his chance to appear to her as Perseus to Andromeda
, as Thrones, Dominations puts it.
I am reminded a little of Marie Curie's saying that she couldn't have done research either as a Polish woman in Poland or as a French woman in France; as a Polishwoman in France, she could never quite be a lady, so doing something as unladylike as research didn't shock everyone around her into resistance.
(I should check the last two attributions but am lazy & hurried.)
Project Gutenberg etext #7059
So wrote clew in Fiction (20th c.). | TrackBack