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Miss Darby's Debut
Coming to England to escape her horrible stepfather, Tessa Darby is determined to reform England's brutal child labor laws and feels that Harrison Belmour, the fifth Earl of Penwyck, is the perfect person to help her, but much to her chagrin, she finds herself falling in love with the self-righteous gentleman. Original.
224 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1999
10 people want to read
About the author
Marilyn Clay
45 books14 followersMarilyn Clay, a multi-published, best-selling and award winning author is also a respected historian of the Regency period in English history. For sixteen years, she published The Regency Plume Newsletter, an international publication chock full of well-researched articles useful to writers, historians and people interested in all aspects of the 18th and early 19th centuries in English history. Kensington Books published six of Marilyn Clay’s Regency-set historical novels in the 1990s, all of which were translated to foreign languages. Marilyn Clay’s Colonial American novels, released in 2010 and 2012, were first published in hardcover by Five Star/Gale and are now available as Ebooks. Four titles in Marilyn Clay's new Juliette Abbott Regency Mysteries are now available in both print and Ebook. Marilyn's books are all available from major online retailers.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
October 4, 2013
Marilyn Clay handles a gripping issue of Regency times with aplomb. Her knowledge of the Regency period is exceptional. In this story, the heroine is an American girl in London whose debut is forced upon her by a friend of her late mother. There are several laugh-out-loud funny scenes, which alone make this book worthwhile!
September 16, 2019
Entertaining Read
As stated this is a sweet and clean Recency Romance. Tess Darby an English young lady by birth, but adopted by the American statesman who married her widowed mother. As the story unfolds it becomes clear that Tess hasn't been treated well by her step father and the final blow dealt is that she must marry a m an of his choosing. Tess through careful planning gets her stepfather to allow her to travel to London, in the pretence of having a session, in London she is to stay with a close friend of her late mother's and here she meets the ladies son, Lord Penwyck, who is very 'hard nosed' aristocrat and who has definite ideas on what a societal lady should be like and it is most definitely not Tess Darby. Over Tess's stay the couple grow closer and Lord Penwyck comes to appreciate Tess's intelligence, and knowledge of political matters as well as her beliefs for the treatment of working women and children. and a love develops between the two until Tess is due to return home.
The story is very sweet with funny moments between Tess and Lord Penwyck, it is a well written book and well worth the read, I would thoroughly recommend it.
As stated this is a sweet and clean Recency Romance. Tess Darby an English young lady by birth, but adopted by the American statesman who married her widowed mother. As the story unfolds it becomes clear that Tess hasn't been treated well by her step father and the final blow dealt is that she must marry a m an of his choosing. Tess through careful planning gets her stepfather to allow her to travel to London, in the pretence of having a session, in London she is to stay with a close friend of her late mother's and here she meets the ladies son, Lord Penwyck, who is very 'hard nosed' aristocrat and who has definite ideas on what a societal lady should be like and it is most definitely not Tess Darby. Over Tess's stay the couple grow closer and Lord Penwyck comes to appreciate Tess's intelligence, and knowledge of political matters as well as her beliefs for the treatment of working women and children. and a love develops between the two until Tess is due to return home.
The story is very sweet with funny moments between Tess and Lord Penwyck, it is a well written book and well worth the read, I would thoroughly recommend it.
May 15, 2025
I'm afraid Miss Darby would have been carted off to the stews the moment she stepped out independently at the docks, never to be seen again. Not much of a story there, so she did make it to her destination & thence carried on like an ungrateful idiot, only getting away with it because the countess was such a scatterwit & she had the earl's protection. All the characters are caricature-ish & none of them likeable. A load of rubbish, really, a modern tale plopped into Regency England, & not very well. The more I think about it, the more I feel that 2★ is too generous, but I'll leave it.
November 14, 2019
Delightful!
An engaging romance playing on the trope of an American in Regency London. There are some darker threads woven into the story as Heyer often did. The earl was not just a prig to start with, he was an aggressive one. That made his later character development more problematic for me. And I thought the conclusion was rushed. Tessa is underage and I thought the question of how the ‘wicked stepfather’ would be trounced was highly relevant.
An engaging romance playing on the trope of an American in Regency London. There are some darker threads woven into the story as Heyer often did. The earl was not just a prig to start with, he was an aggressive one. That made his later character development more problematic for me. And I thought the conclusion was rushed. Tessa is underage and I thought the question of how the ‘wicked stepfather’ would be trounced was highly relevant.
February 4, 2015
Okay, so I admit to enjoying those novels set in Olde Englande. But then, Jane Austen is held in enough esteem to read at school so why not spend some time with imitators. This author seems to have done some homework into the era, or at least managed to write without glaring slips into modernism.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews