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A review by siria
The Making of a Marchioness by Frances Hodgson Burnett, C.D. Williams
lighthearted
2.75
Emily Fox-Seton is a 30-something spinster in Edwardian London, well-bred and impossibly good-natured but penniless. She ekes out a living as a kind of genteel fixer for upper-class women, who pay her a pittance or in cast-off clothes. Emily unexpectedly gets an invitation to a week-long country house party, and given the genre and the book title, I don't think it's a spoiler to say that by the end of it she's had her Cinderella glow-up. Frances Hodgson Burnett's writing is wildly sentimental and predictable, of course, but there are just enough veiled comments about the characters and how society treats women as disposable to stop this from being unbearably saccharine.
I did find it dryly amusing that one female character was desperate to get married because if she didn't, a dire fate awaited her: having to go live in Ireland. Gasp!
(I read an edition containing only the first book, The Making of a Marchioness, and not its sequel, The Methods of Lady Walderhurst. Judging by other reviews, that was probably a good choice; the sequel takes a turn into racist melodrama.)
I did find it dryly amusing that one female character was desperate to get married because if she didn't, a dire fate awaited her: having to go live in Ireland. Gasp!
(I read an edition containing only the first book, The Making of a Marchioness, and not its sequel, The Methods of Lady Walderhurst. Judging by other reviews, that was probably a good choice; the sequel takes a turn into racist melodrama.)