Based on the true story of Elizabeth Armistead, one of the most notorious and successful courtesans of 18th century England.
From the harsh streets of London, Lizzie Cane rose to become the celebrated mistress of earls, dukes, and even a prince! Then at the height of her career, she risked everything she had struggled to gain by breaking the courtesan’s cardinal rule…Never fall in love.
Another, average freebie from Amazon, and less unsettling than the last one in its premise. This is a fictionalised version of the real courtesan Elizabeth Armistead (born Crane), who crawls out of the gutter to become a whore, then a courtesan, and then the wife of the politician Charles Fox.
Details of the working life in a brothel is relatively detailed, but the sex details soon disappear and are largely ignored. The list of her conquests is long and a tad confusing when you are trying to remember who is who. The size of the circles she ends up in is fairly small, so the same people end up going around with the same “fallen women” and it’s not long before everyone is pretty much sleeping with everyone else’s exes. The one that upsets Armistead the most is Perditia Robinson, who inspires extreme jealously in Armistead, especially when she is out with a current or previous patron.
The book starts and ends with the warning that a courtesan must “never fall in love” as if there is some foreshadowing of some great calamity/ies for Armistead if she doesn’t heed the warnings. Far from it it seems. As she gets older she realises that she has fallen in love with her friend Charles Fox, and they finally settle down and get married (albeit in secret). The biggest “disaster” this seems to entail for Armistead is that she has to settle down (with someone with dubious levels of debts) and not actually sleep around. Much of the book also references America trying for independence, and the general politics going on in Britain at the time.
This is clearly made for the American market, with little consideration for the market outside of this, as I can tell from one of my bugbears in these kinds of books. Despite stating the author had done “large amount of research” all characters referred to the season of “autumn” as “fall”. It was repeated multiple times in this book. It is a purely American word and not used in England to describe the season. (In other recent Romance novels I’ve come across Regency English people announcing that somewhere was “only a block away” (it’s not a measure of distance the Brits use).
So in summary: Not the worst (creepiest) Romance I’ve read recently, an annoying Americanism that kept interrupting the flow of the story, and a romp through a turbulent time in British history.
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