A review by michellechien930
Bringing Down the Duke by Evie Dunmore

3.0

I just went through another Regency era of late after I watched Emma (2020)/Northanger Abbey/Sanditon back to back! I'm not a Regency era expert, save my love for Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy and Bridgerton, but always looking for more I would like, so I was pretty excited to start this series. Bringing Down the Duke focuses on women's suffrage and the dawn of women being educated at colleges, etc. It's a bit deja vu, the era is similar to Red Dead Redemption 2, which I've been playing daily, (1899 in America) vs. 1879ish in England, and both feature women that are admirably lobbying for the vote against patriarchal protest. It's a very interesting historical backdrop, and while I admired the characters, I felt like the suffrage plotline was really merely a plot device for the titular duke and the vicar's daughter to have a "meet cute", and once they were, the plot was abandoned. I feel like in almost every piece of Regency literature it features the lady being sick and kept at the great manor and she reads the books in his bookshelves and they fall in love. I still find it endearing but it does get kind of tiresome, sped through this book fairly quickly though, enjoyed the characters a lot.