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A review by jackiehorne
The Rakess by Scarlett Peckham
3.0
ARC courtesy of Netgalley
In her opening Author's Note, Peckham writes about the idea with which this first book in her new series began: of writing a romance featuring not a male, but a female, rake. Given the double standard in which our culture (especially in the past, but also still today) praises men for their sexual exploits while condemning and shaming women for theirs, simply switching the sex of the traditional rake figure isn't really workable. At least, not without invoking another trope, Peckham argues: the trope of the ruined woman. Though Peckham argues that the novel which follows combines the two tropes, the book ultimately depends far more on the latter than on the former.
A second source for her story, Peckham notes, is Mary Wollstonecraft, a woman she discovered via reading Charlotte Gordon's dual biography of Wollstonecraft and her daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Invoking the elder Wollstonecraft set up certain expectations for me, a scholar of 18th and 19th century British Lit: specifically, expectations about the character of the female protagonist, which may have made me not care for the first chapters of the story (because they don't really deliver on those expectations). Wollstonecraft did have several passionate love affairs outside of marriage, it's true, but I'd never consider her a female rake, someone who indulged in sex for sex's sake only, without caring for her partner. Her attitude was pretty much the opposite: she cared too much for the three men with whom she had extramarital affairs, while the first two ultimately treated her much as a rake would, by abandoning her. In her Author's Note, Peckham refers to Wollstonecraft's most famous work as A Vindication of the Rights of Women rather than its actual title, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (at least in the ARC I read; was it corrected in the actual book?), which suggests that she was more familiar with the biography of Wollstonecraft than with her ideas (Wollstonecraft is deeply suspicious of sex in The Vindication). Peckham does say that Wollstonecraft was "certainly not a freewheeling rake," which suggests that Wollstonecraft might not be the best model for her main character, Seraphina Arden, whom we first meet on her way to a sexual tryst with her latest of many lovers.
The story that Peckham spins starts off quite slowly. Seraphina has left London to stay in the Cornwall house she's inherited from her parents, near the town which witnessed her "ruin" as a young woman and shamed her out of society. Since then, Sera has become infamous by penning books about the wrongs done to women by society, and by lecturing and advocating for female rights (the writing of such works is not at all ahistorical, but the idea that she would become financially well-off by so-doing certainly is; Wollstonecraft was often scrambling to make financial ends meet). Sera has left London to write her latest book, a memoir, which promises to reveal the identity of the aristocratic man who initially ruined her (a secret that the book keeps hidden from the reader, too). But the townspeople are not at all happy at her return, and someone tries intimidate and frighten her by leaving offensive signs and dead birds on her property.
In the opening chapter, Seraphina is off to a tryst with her latest casual lover, one of many she's taken over the 12 years since she was last in Cornwall. But instead of finding Henri at the abandoned belvedere on the edge of her property, she meets Scotsman and widower Adam Anderson, an architect working on remodeling the estate next to Seraphina's ramshackle house. Sera ends up sending Henri away ("Last night, Henri had tragically revealed himself to be that most unwelcome of creatures: a cuddler") and later propositioning Adam. But Adam, once as adventurous and reckless as Sera, turns Sera down (due to interesting backstory which I won't reveal here). But about a third of the way into the story, he reconsiders, and the two engage in a passionate sexual tryst. And despite his beta hero presentation, Adam turns out to be quite the experienced and daring lover, a perfect sexual match for Sera.
Before they begin their affair, Sera is having difficulty writing her memoir, since she's never really faced the trauma of what happened to her. That trauma, it turns out, as is the case with many a male rake in historical romance, has led her to engage in sex without emotional connection: "Erotic entertainment was like a trapdoor from one's worries. She longed to slide out of her mind and into bed." Thus, Peckham's novel isn't really a female sex-positive story, but rather the story of a woman who uses sex (and alcohol) wrongly, to keep herself emotionally safe, a woman who must learn to stop pushing others away and to settle into a long-term monogamous heterosexual relationship. Minor characters suggest that this isn't the only possible way for a woman to be happy in society, but the main romance plot certainly does.
All that said, when we finally get to spend real time with Adam and Sera together, Peckham gives us complex, engagingly drawn characters, characters with whom I found myself growing more and more intrigued. Adam, you see, is taken aback, even hurt, by Sera's emotional distance ("men were for displaying wit and cleavage to, not emotions") after their first sexual encounter. For her part, Sera thinks "She had been wrong about him. He was not the kind of man who became ashamed after sex. He was the kind who became moved." Walls up, Sera coldly pushes him away. Thinking of his two young children, and his sister, all of whom have accompanied him to Cornwall, Adam breaks off their affair. But then he comes back...
Only to be interrupted by the novel's subplot, about Sera's mentor being secreted away in a lunatic asylum by her husband, and Sera's effort, with her two other disreputable female friends (a painter and a courtesan), to find her and set her free. I wished that Peckham had saved that story for another book, as it is given short shrift in this one. Because when that rescue is quickly dispensed with, the story quickly returns to Sera and threats by unknown townspeople against her. Which concludes with a huge argument between Adam and a drunken Sera, each of them unaware of the hurts and reasons the other is acting and reacting they way they are. Part 1 of the novel ends with their painful separation.
Part 2 is set in London, several months later, when Sera is on the verge of publishing her memoir, and Adam is growing increasingly stressed by the demands of his business partnership with his brother-in-law. The two encounter one another again, and gradually agree to be friends. But their attraction soon overcomes their scruples, and they begin an affair once again. But when Sera's reputation endangers Adam's business prospects, their relationship is once again at risk.
So, I have mixed feelings about Peckham's latest. I still love the wit and sensuality of her prose ("[her name] would feel delicious rolling off his tongue, with all those slinking syllables"), and the depth of her character development. The story starts off slowly; it took me until about a third of the way through before I stopped being annoyed and put off by Sera because she wasn't like Wollstonecraft and because she is so off-putting herself, and began feeling emotionally connected to her. Adam is a wonderful character, deeply kind AND sexually adventurous (anal play is no biggie to him). Peckham does portray Seraphina's life as difficult because she doesn't follow social norms, but even so, the idea that many women would contribute to her and her friends' efforts to build a "philanthropic institute that would work for the advancement and education of the female sex" is wildly pie in the sky for this period. It makes it seem as if the advances of women's rights advocates in the past were far easier than they were, which doesn't give such women as Wollstonecraft enough credit for their radicalism in a time when women's rights were hugely more constrained than they are today.
In her opening Author's Note, Peckham writes about the idea with which this first book in her new series began: of writing a romance featuring not a male, but a female, rake. Given the double standard in which our culture (especially in the past, but also still today) praises men for their sexual exploits while condemning and shaming women for theirs, simply switching the sex of the traditional rake figure isn't really workable. At least, not without invoking another trope, Peckham argues: the trope of the ruined woman. Though Peckham argues that the novel which follows combines the two tropes, the book ultimately depends far more on the latter than on the former.
A second source for her story, Peckham notes, is Mary Wollstonecraft, a woman she discovered via reading Charlotte Gordon's dual biography of Wollstonecraft and her daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Invoking the elder Wollstonecraft set up certain expectations for me, a scholar of 18th and 19th century British Lit: specifically, expectations about the character of the female protagonist, which may have made me not care for the first chapters of the story (because they don't really deliver on those expectations). Wollstonecraft did have several passionate love affairs outside of marriage, it's true, but I'd never consider her a female rake, someone who indulged in sex for sex's sake only, without caring for her partner. Her attitude was pretty much the opposite: she cared too much for the three men with whom she had extramarital affairs, while the first two ultimately treated her much as a rake would, by abandoning her. In her Author's Note, Peckham refers to Wollstonecraft's most famous work as A Vindication of the Rights of Women rather than its actual title, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (at least in the ARC I read; was it corrected in the actual book?), which suggests that she was more familiar with the biography of Wollstonecraft than with her ideas (Wollstonecraft is deeply suspicious of sex in The Vindication). Peckham does say that Wollstonecraft was "certainly not a freewheeling rake," which suggests that Wollstonecraft might not be the best model for her main character, Seraphina Arden, whom we first meet on her way to a sexual tryst with her latest of many lovers.
The story that Peckham spins starts off quite slowly. Seraphina has left London to stay in the Cornwall house she's inherited from her parents, near the town which witnessed her "ruin" as a young woman and shamed her out of society. Since then, Sera has become infamous by penning books about the wrongs done to women by society, and by lecturing and advocating for female rights (the writing of such works is not at all ahistorical, but the idea that she would become financially well-off by so-doing certainly is; Wollstonecraft was often scrambling to make financial ends meet). Sera has left London to write her latest book, a memoir, which promises to reveal the identity of the aristocratic man who initially ruined her (a secret that the book keeps hidden from the reader, too). But the townspeople are not at all happy at her return, and someone tries intimidate and frighten her by leaving offensive signs and dead birds on her property.
In the opening chapter, Seraphina is off to a tryst with her latest casual lover, one of many she's taken over the 12 years since she was last in Cornwall. But instead of finding Henri at the abandoned belvedere on the edge of her property, she meets Scotsman and widower Adam Anderson, an architect working on remodeling the estate next to Seraphina's ramshackle house. Sera ends up sending Henri away ("Last night, Henri had tragically revealed himself to be that most unwelcome of creatures: a cuddler") and later propositioning Adam. But Adam, once as adventurous and reckless as Sera, turns Sera down (due to interesting backstory which I won't reveal here). But about a third of the way into the story, he reconsiders, and the two engage in a passionate sexual tryst. And despite his beta hero presentation, Adam turns out to be quite the experienced and daring lover, a perfect sexual match for Sera.
Before they begin their affair, Sera is having difficulty writing her memoir, since she's never really faced the trauma of what happened to her. That trauma, it turns out, as is the case with many a male rake in historical romance, has led her to engage in sex without emotional connection: "Erotic entertainment was like a trapdoor from one's worries. She longed to slide out of her mind and into bed." Thus, Peckham's novel isn't really a female sex-positive story, but rather the story of a woman who uses sex (and alcohol) wrongly, to keep herself emotionally safe, a woman who must learn to stop pushing others away and to settle into a long-term monogamous heterosexual relationship. Minor characters suggest that this isn't the only possible way for a woman to be happy in society, but the main romance plot certainly does.
All that said, when we finally get to spend real time with Adam and Sera together, Peckham gives us complex, engagingly drawn characters, characters with whom I found myself growing more and more intrigued. Adam, you see, is taken aback, even hurt, by Sera's emotional distance ("men were for displaying wit and cleavage to, not emotions") after their first sexual encounter. For her part, Sera thinks "She had been wrong about him. He was not the kind of man who became ashamed after sex. He was the kind who became moved." Walls up, Sera coldly pushes him away. Thinking of his two young children, and his sister, all of whom have accompanied him to Cornwall, Adam breaks off their affair. But then he comes back...
Only to be interrupted by the novel's subplot, about Sera's mentor being secreted away in a lunatic asylum by her husband, and Sera's effort, with her two other disreputable female friends (a painter and a courtesan), to find her and set her free. I wished that Peckham had saved that story for another book, as it is given short shrift in this one. Because when that rescue is quickly dispensed with, the story quickly returns to Sera and threats by unknown townspeople against her. Which concludes with a huge argument between Adam and a drunken Sera, each of them unaware of the hurts and reasons the other is acting and reacting they way they are. Part 1 of the novel ends with their painful separation.
Part 2 is set in London, several months later, when Sera is on the verge of publishing her memoir, and Adam is growing increasingly stressed by the demands of his business partnership with his brother-in-law. The two encounter one another again, and gradually agree to be friends. But their attraction soon overcomes their scruples, and they begin an affair once again. But when Sera's reputation endangers Adam's business prospects, their relationship is once again at risk.
So, I have mixed feelings about Peckham's latest. I still love the wit and sensuality of her prose ("[her name] would feel delicious rolling off his tongue, with all those slinking syllables"), and the depth of her character development. The story starts off slowly; it took me until about a third of the way through before I stopped being annoyed and put off by Sera because she wasn't like Wollstonecraft and because she is so off-putting herself, and began feeling emotionally connected to her. Adam is a wonderful character, deeply kind AND sexually adventurous (anal play is no biggie to him). Peckham does portray Seraphina's life as difficult because she doesn't follow social norms, but even so, the idea that many women would contribute to her and her friends' efforts to build a "philanthropic institute that would work for the advancement and education of the female sex" is wildly pie in the sky for this period. It makes it seem as if the advances of women's rights advocates in the past were far easier than they were, which doesn't give such women as Wollstonecraft enough credit for their radicalism in a time when women's rights were hugely more constrained than they are today.