This painfully sincere novel fails on many levels. It is haphazardly imagined and arbitrarily constructed, and its characters are cardboard-thin. Its protagonist, physician Martin Frame, is the son of a brutish doctor who treats hysteria with adamantine harshness. Unlike his father, Frame does not believe that women should be treated like barnyard animals; he is interested in applying a version of good old Freud's talking cure to women in distress.

A friend of a patient introduces him to the Wildes, and Frame is smitten with Constance's constancy. Plus, she smells good and appears to be halfway bright. He feels compelled to aid her in recovering from her attachment to Oscar.

This is in some ways an interesting premise, but Elfman doesn't go far enough in imagining these people and what their relationships could have been. Writing historical fiction requires a certain amount of brashness, a willingness to presume to speak for the dead. That doesn't happen here... Elfman seems overwhelmed by the significance of what she is about.

The structure of the novel also leaves something to be desired... chapter epigrams seem arbitrary in this short first-person account; they read like bits of preliminary character sketches and research notes, draft work that should have been edited out of the final product.

What is it about Oscar Wilde that makes him so difficult to capture in print or on film? The recent awful biopic of Oscar was every bit as wooden as this well-meant but unsuccessful novel.

The amazingly headstrong antics of the youngest sister were also hard to believe. While I am sure that headstrong young women existed then, such behavior would have been labelled as fast and been condemned by society. The ability of Gwendolen to persuade a would-be seducer to change his itinerary was also hard to believe - especially given what we were told about the man's character.

Enjoy the story for its own sake. It is not particularly true to Regency society, and the story line may be a bit too tame for today's readers. However, the absence of explicit details and the generally decorous behavior of most of the characters might please more conservative readers who are put off by explicit sex in modern Regencies. Those who like the genre should however try at least one Clare Darcy to see the transition between Heyer and the modern Regency exemplified by Signet and Zebra (in the American market).

A spoiler - the story plot is described simply because there is no editorial description. The heroine Gwendolen starts the book engaged to a naval hero; her middle sister Jane has been a social success and returns home with a Marquess following her to propose marriage. She however is in love with the secretary on a neighboring estate. Jane however has several problems. First, she is in love with a poor man. Second, her love is the wrong nationality, from the point of view of her father. Third, this man works for one of her father's most-hated neighbors. Fourth, Jane would be seen as foolish to marry for love, when she has a title and wealth on offer; in fact, her family is in desperate straits. As if this were not enough, the youngest sister is also engaged to an impecunious young officer, and must delay her marriage.

During the novel, all three romances come unstuck. Only Jane remains in love with her secretary, but must consent to a pseudo-engagement to throw off others. Gwendolen dismisses her fiance in an amusing scene; the youngest behaves with indiscretion and impetuosity in dismissing her lover. On top of all this, their father loses their family home and they are obliged to move away. Fear not, at the end, each young woman is reunited with the man whom she secretly desires.

Mr. Quarters observed, "I've never held with marquisates. A jumped up sort of title. Earls and barons were good enough for us in the old days." Which would have done very well had Mr. Quarters stuck to this position, because Jane is in love with the impoverished but beautiful French emigre secretary of the Duke of Tardiff. However, Mr. Quarters is also a wastral, and very heavily indebted to the notorious moneylenders Messers Smith and Brown. Therefore even a Marquis with fifty thousand pounds a year is not to be whistled down the wind.

Into this situation Lyndale arrives with a flash of carriage wheels, sending Gwendolen who happened to be strolling along the same narrow lane tumbling into a ditch to avoid being run down. This is symbolic of the way in which everyone's neat plans are overturned.

Jane is such a dutiful thing that if not managed correctly she might accept the Marquis as a well of salvaging the family fortunes. Gwendolen discovers that her handsome heroic captain is really a pompous bore. Campaspe, the third daughter, in an effort to save Jane alienates her fiance. It hardly seems that all will come right in the end.

The main problem with the book and the reason I would have given it 3 1/2 stars instead of 4 if it were possible, was that Ms. Darcy has a problem getting all of her lovers situated for the denouement. In fact the strategem is downright silly. However, there are enough fun moments in this book to make up for this.

One of the things that I think might disturb readers used to recent Regency romances, is that the plot is not so much two people coming to understand they are in permanent ecstatic love, blah, blah, blah. The plot instead involves overcoming all of the obstacles: familial, financial and social that stand between two people coming to an understanding. Ms. Darcy is also really very knowledgeable about the Regency period, from the price of a post chaise to how bets were placed at a race, but her plots could have used a stronger editorial hand.

I'm only 60 pages into the anthology but the errors are unsurprising, given the number of similar errors in Volume 1A. A disappointment: buy the Norton anthology edited by the respected M. H. Abrams instead.

unfortunately counterbalanced by his intellectual naivete. For instance, Winnicott's interpretation of childhood experience as essentially solipsistic, and of the blossoming of the self that is supposed to result from a support of this solipsism by the mother (and later the analyst) seem naively Rousseauian and theoretically untenable. (If the infant really starts of as a solipsist, how can the mother ever affect her at all?) Positing a gradual disillusionment, as W does, doesn't help much when his theory is set up in such a way that it does not allow for the perception of objective reality, and thus for the possibility of disillusionment, in the first place. I would suggest that readers read Winnicott lovingly but critically, and would specifically recommend that this book be juxtaposed with Derrida's critiques of Rousseau from _Of Grammatology_, which can be applied to Winnicott almost in toto.

I never really read it, because it didn't apply to me...
so I gave it a neutral(I think) 3 star rating.