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Living Section of the San Bernardino SUN February 6, 2005 Issue 
The Reluctant Guardian By Jo Manning Regency Press, 1999 
Escape the Daily Grind into a Regency Romance The days when my friends and I scorned romance fiction and spitefully called all those books "bodice rippers" are long gone. Our erstwhile discussions about "Waiting for Godot," Marcuse's political philosophy or the films of Cocteau and Godard have been replaced with what we feared the most - the philistine daily grind. We now read self-help books about dealing with stress and new age literature, which in truth, is not literature at all. Sometime during my transition from challenging the status quo to joining it, I was introduced to Georgette Heyer, the queen of the Regency Romance novel. I was immediately struck by her extraordinary talent of treating the reader to a slice of English cultural history during the time of the regency of George, Price of Wales who later became George IV. In no time I had exhausted Georgette Heyer's oeuvre and wanted more of the same fare. Regency Romance novels are a dime a dozen. But well written Regency Romances that surreptitiously lead the reader into a cultural history lesson are rare. Once again, a librarian has come to the rescue - this time of the Regency Romance novel. Jo Manning, a former librarian has saved the genre from its descend into the mundane and trashy and has elevated it back to cultural history. "The Reluctant Guardian" is Jo Manning's second Regency novel. It has all the requisite Regency romance characteristics, albeit, with a twentieth century attitude. Matthew Martin, a middle age English squire, abandons his daughters in the dark of night in order to elope with a "Cyprian," in Regency parlance - a courtesan. Gently bred ladies are neither supposed to know nor discuss such things. Worse, this puts the Martin girls who are of marriageable age, in a compromising situation. For social decorum requires that gently bred ladies be chaperoned. Their father's defection leaves Mary and Sally, by the standards of Regency society - totally defenseless. Furthermore, their father has plucked them out of their cozy country home and has brought them to wicked London without giving a single thought to bringing them out, i.e., to give them a season of "routs and balls, secure vouchers at Almack's, put them on the Marriage Mart and snare them well-to-do husbands." Sir Isaac Rebow is summoned to the girls' side by his mother and their paternal aunt - virago of a woman - Madam. Mean-spirited and spiteful Madam, tries to command everyone from her distant country seat, Wivenhoe Park. Reluctantly Sir Rebow becomes the guardian of the Martin sisters. Mary, the older daughter, accepts this guardianship reluctantly also, even belligerently. Never mind that she has been secretly in love with her cousin, Sir Isaac Rebow from the time she was a child. He too is smitten with her. But the destructive relationship of Sir Rebow's parents, has soured him on matrimony and he has sworn it off completely. He is quite surprised to find two lovely and self-sufficient young women in the place of the simple country girls he had assumed them to be. Naturally, Mary and Sir Isaac cross daggers. Gradually he realizes that she is indeed, a very intelligent and capable young woman and that she simply does not need his guardianship. And herein lies the novel's twist. There is nothing mawkish or Regency about Mary. She is a thoroughly independent and self-reliant young woman, very much like a 20th century woman. Sir Isaac has to come to terms with this entirely new aspect of female character.In a postscript at the end of the book, the author reveals that "The Reluctant Guardian" is based on a real life story of two English aristocrats that lived during the mid-Georgian period. She discovered the letters of Mary Martin Rebow to her cousin and later husband Sir Isaac Rebow in the dusty archives of the Washington State University Library when she worked there. Most of the characters in the book are real life people carrying their real life names. Even Wivenhoe Park is real. A painting of it by Constable hangs in the National Gallery in Washington, DC. Only the time period is different. Manning has placed her characters in Regency England because Regency stories offer readers an infinitely better escape as well as a sweeping cultural panorama. Ophelia Georgiev Roop Library Director San Bernardino Public Library |
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