Weekly Reader: An Elegant Facade by Kristi Ann Hunter: A Brilliant Regency-Era Romance About The Difficulties of Maintaining Perfection

Weekly Reader: An Elegant Façade by Kristi Ann Hunter, A Brilliant Regency-Era Romance About the Difficulties of Maintaining Perfection 

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews

Spoilers: The best laid plans of mice, men, and blogger/book reviewers often go awry. Originally, I was going to review A Night In With Audrey Hepburn by Lucy Holiday but it was late in arriving via Inter library Loan so I am reviewing An Elegant Façade. (A Night In With Audrey Hepburn arrived, so I am planning on making it a bonus Weekly Reader for the coming week.). Anyway, Kristi Ann Hunter’s Regency-era tribute to the works of Jane Austen makes for a lovely romantic substitute and is a brilliant novel about a woman doing everything she can to maintain an air of perfection for fear that she would be seen as flawed.

Lady Georgina Hawthorne can’t wait for her Season in which she will be presented in English society and be able to hopefully find and catch a rich titled husband. She and her lady’s maid, Harriett have been preparing for this moment for a long time. Georgina always makes a point to wear white, so she can be eye catching to the many gentlemen. She and Harriett pour over the Debrett’s Peerage to find the most available suitors. Georgina practises where to stand, how to sit, speak properly. She affects a cold haughty air to those around her, so they don’t bother to ask her too many questions. She acts like a person with something to hide.

Because she is a person with something to hide: Georgina is illiterate. Her whole life is spent hiding this secret even from family members. When she was younger, Harriett transcribed all of her lessons and interpreted her schoolwork for her. Georgina and Harriett rise two hours before everyone else so Harriet can read her mistress her invitations and write letters for her, without anyone knowing. It’s almost entertaining but sad at the lengths Georgina goes to cover up her deception.

When she is handed a note, she acts in a frantic way and tells someone else, “Just read it!” to hide that she couldn’t. A potential greedy unlikable suitor passes her instructions to meet him and Georgina says that she refuses to be summoned like a stable hand. Georgina would rather be perceived as a hysterical incompetent or a haughty bitch than be seen as someone with an imperfection that she feels would make her an outcast from society.

Despite her haughty exterior, she catches the eye of Colin McCrae, a Scottish businessman who has ascended high enough in English society to be accepted to fine gentry parties, but he is still held under scrutiny. He has powerful friends that help him enter society like Georgina’s brother, Lord Trent and Ryland, the Duke of Marshingham and suitor to Georgina’s sister, Miranda. Ryland is also in the British Secret Service and he and Colin are on the look for some sinister characters while Ryland disguises himself to court Miranda. (These subplots are elaborated upon in the previous book, A Noble Masquerade making the two books meant to take place simultaneously. It is a noble undertaking for an author, but sometimes annoying for a reader if they haven’t read the previous book.)

Of course Colin and Georgina engage in byplay and witticisms in which they annoy each other with Colin’s arrogance and Georgina’s haughtiness but can’t seem to get each other out of their minds.

However, the two show a great deal of growth and development. The moment when Colin sees a frantic and tearful Georgina agonizing over the words in a letter and offers to read it for her is moving.  Also, the compassion and understanding that he has for how isolated she feels in trying to build this perfect facade is brilliant.

In Georgina, he also sees qualities he lacks in his own character. He can’t understand why if Georgina is so close to her family, particularly her loving siblings, that she keeps her illiteracy a secret from them. This feeling for honesty towards family, gives him the courage to speak to his own estranged family particularly his gambler father who ended up losing the family business. He also opens himself up to looking at Georgina as a person and not just a spoiled entitled aristocrat.

An Elegant Façade is what’s known as an Inspirational Romance, in which characters speak of and extol Christian virtues. While there is some talk about Georgina feeling God cursed her with her affliction and Colin reads the Bible frequently, it’s not as over-emphasized as it is in other Inspirational Fiction. Instead, Hunter trusts the Readers to make their own connections to the themes in the story.

Most importantly Hunter provides the Reader with two engaging characters in a beautiful nostalgic setting and allows those characters to change each other along the way.