The phoenix of love

Sold by her dissolute father at ten years of age and married to a degenerate aristocrat (whose one redeeming feature was his agreement to leave her alone until she was 18) Olivia Wentworth then endured two further years of misery as the remnants of her father’s conscience drove him to treat her with wildly oscillating hatred and self-pitying condemnation. On her father’s death, Olivia was rescued by her maternal grandmother who, over the next six years, showered her with love. And yet it was not enough to pierce the self-protective, icy shield she had erected in order to survive the treatment of her father. Olivia was uncertain she could ever put her troubled past behind her, particularly when she was shocked to discover that the kindly “pirate” she fondly remembered meeting at the age of ten - and who she dreamed would return to rescue her - did exist. Catching a glimpse of him in a London street when she was 16 she knew that her father had lied when he told her that her memory of meeting that unknown man was a figment of her imagination. A chance encounter with that man at a ball resulted in her learning, for the first time, of his name and status. It also led to John Marston (Marquis of Traverston) responding to their introduction with a brutal (and public) announcement that he was her husband. The marriage was a travesty but one that the Marquis can not totally repudiate. Olivia, for more complex reasons, feels similarly trapped. John and Olivia have both been scarred by loss, abandonment and violence. This repels them, as it draws them together. Furthermore, it gives them a unique insight into one another’s characters. This interesting thread is sadly weakened by much used HR stereotypes and plot - evil mistress, villainous and resentful illegitimate sibling, wildly handsome best friend who falls madly in love with heroine, duelling at dawn etc etc. A pity, because, at one stage it seemed that the childhood hurts of the hero and heroine were sufficiently complex to make this a tale that would be out of the ordinary.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.