The Making of a Marchioness

This week I read "The Making of a Marchioness" by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Best known for "A Little Princess" and "The Secret Garden", I learned through the blog 'Random Jottings of a Book and Opera Lover' that Burnett had written many adult fiction books as well. It was a very interesting book, quite a contrast to the many regency romances I've read written by today's authors. Today's romances often use the flavorings of historical periods but modernize the attitudes of the hero/heroine so that the unpleasant or un-admiral qualities of the time period are frankly whitewashed away. Since this book was written in 1901 in the Edwardian age, that whitewashing has not occurred so what you get is an unvarnished look at marriage attitudes and what it was like for women in that time period. To consider what it must have been like for women when marriage was the only way out of a life of hardwork and semi-poverty with no social system to fall back on in the case of illness was very sobering. It really made me think about what a luxury it is today that women can marry or not but if they choose to marry, they can definitely wait til they fall in love. That being said, I do think that many women marry for financial considerations or because they don't want to be alone even today, they just don't admit it. It doesn't seem to me to be a bad reason except when the woman isn't sufficiently appreciative of the man and disdains him. Emily, the heroine in this book, I assure you, appreciates her husband to the point of worship and is perfectly willing to die for him in gratitude of the fate he has saved her from. Next, I'm on to a biography of Lucy Maud Montgomery, the author of the Anne of Green Gables series which I've never read but I did see the terrific mini series on TV a few years ago. It's a little backwards, I admit. :0)