Dear Reader

Not a bookselling site - just a place where I can chat about what I've been reading lately.

Thursday, March 09, 2006

Betty Neels, Regency author?

I'm sick again. This is ridiculous, of course, because I was sick less than a month ago. I've been spending a lot of time lying down, but only 8 hours (out of every 24) sleeping. So yesterday I picked up a Betty Neels romance. She wrote many, many romances for Harlequin (well, Mills & Boon) before she died. In this one, the hero decides to marry the heroine, Olympia, after meeting only half a dozen times or so - sedate afternoons where they'd go to a museum and then out to tea. And of course this is preposterous, him proposing so soon (especially because he's a widower with a preschool-aged daughter!). Then I thought, "well, if this were a Regency, it wouldn't be astonishing behavior", and then things clicked. Was Betty Neels writing modern-day Regencies? I'll never know, but it's an amusing idea.