A review by tessisreading2
An Arranged Marriage by Jo Beverley

2.0

I've been enjoying re-reading Jo Beverley, completely out-of-order, but had some difficulty with this one from page one. The general plot thread of the novel is similar to The Viscount Needs a Wife - Eleanor adjusting to married life, Nicholas having a political life outside her. It's a little surprising that some scenes which would be big scenes in most romance novels happen off-screen here (e.g. when Nicholas meets Eleanor's dastardly brother). However, in this case, the political plot is that

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Nicholas must seduce a Frenchwoman of dubious morals despite his recent marriage, which is just kind of gross. He literally spends most of the novel hiding his feelings for Eleanor because he's sleeping with the mistress throughout and it strikes him as gross to go from the mistress' bed to his wife's, which, yes, it is.

In the meantime, the "big misunderstanding" that brings the hero and heroine together is that the hero's brother - who is actually mostly gay - rapes the heroine while she is unconscious, then tells the heroine that the rapist is actually his twin (the hero), who will marry her. The heroine, having few other options, agrees to marry her rapist, only to discover after the marriage (and the wedding night) that she was actually assaulted by her brother-in-law. I find this whole situation viscerally horrifying, and Beverley's treatment of it even more so; the entire rape is treated generally as a seduction might have been (strait-laced hero marries brother's cast-off seductee, the plot of many a Harlequin). The hero repeatedly tells the heroine that she should forgive and forget (no, he literally says that, and when she objects he says she must be pregnant because pregnant ladies are always emotional); the brother-in-law at one point argues that the heroine and the baby should come and live with him so that he can raise his heir himself; and the heroine finally decides that she's not going to be mad at the brother-in-law because he's managed to block out the rape so she should too. WHAT. In a charitable frame of mind, I will suggest that this book was published far enough back in Ye Olden Days that Beverley couldn't have a heroine who was a willing seductee, and at the very least did not set up a Flame and the Flower situation where the hero rapes the heroine, but the plotline does not age well at all and this book is not a re-read.

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