Review: Love in a convenient marriage
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 7, 2014
The impoverished Earl of Aftlake receives a rather surprising marriage proposition from an extremely wealthy but untitled young woman, Katherine Chandler. She is out to ensure her children gain entrance to the higher levels of society, not wanting them to experience the brush-off’s she’s had to handle most of her life due to her father’s illegitimacy. To his credit, the Earl is quite doubtful about the set-up, but – as the title so clearly states – beggars can’t be choosers, and so the Earl agrees to this marriage of convenience, which even has an exit clause in it.Katherine proposes that the marriage be valid until one year after the birth of their second child (assuming one of those children is a boy), at which point she suggests the couple divorce. Hmm. Not an easy thing to achieve in the early 19th century, and it is testament to the author’s knowledge of the period that he didn’t gloss over just how difficult a divorce would be – both legally and socially.However, what starts out as a marriage of convenience quickly develops into something more for each of the contracting parties. But neither of them seem capable of expressing to the other just how much they love each other, thereby creating a number of misunderstandings – especially from Katherine’s side. And as the deadline fast approaches, things take an even nastier turn when Katherine’s fortune is embezzled, while the Earl suddenly finds himself the heir of a lot of money. Suddenly, the positions are reversed, and so things come to quite the emotional crunch.Mr Wilkes is clearly an expert of the period he depicts, which shows in the casual inclusions of customs, furnishings, clothes and foods. He also does a very good job of describing just how constraining the period was – people “had” to behave in a certain fashion to be accepted in society, and while a peer, however poor, had leeway in what he could or couldn’t do, an upstart, however rich, did not. This is the reason for Katherine’s insecurities in her dealings with her husband, although I must admit to moments when I want to shake some sense into her – that the Earl loves her is obvious to everyone but her.Mr Wilkes writes a prose that I suspect has as its intention to recreate how people wrote (and spoke) in his chosen period. While this works in the descriptive passages, I did find the dialogue somewhat clunky, thereby detracting a bit from the overall reading experience. This, of course, is a matter of taste, and for readers enamoured of the period as such, I believe they will find Beggars can’t be Choosier a fun and informative read.