HMMM - Good or Bad

Well, I was hoping my next romance novel would be really good - the kind I give a big heart-felt sigh at the end of. When I started An Accomplished Woman by Jude Morgan, I thought I had it. Funny, funny laugh-out loud lines, great descriptions, poetic beaus, and two of my favorite Austen characters - a kind of eviler Mrs. Bennett and a dead-on Catherine DeBurgh. The novel opens with our accomplished woman, Lydia, in London visiting with her brother for no reason except to show us how good her single, accomplished independent life is. A good friend asks her to chaperon a young woman, Phoebe, who's just come out, is very wealthy, and can't make up her mind between two beaus. Lydia, being accomplished and all, doesn't want to but actually ends up liking the girl, so agrees to accompany her to Bath. One of Lydia's accomplishments is that she turned down a marriage proposal ten years earlier for reasons that were never clear to me. Did he not say he loved her? Was she too accomplished? I kept thinking there would be a better explanation - she caught him in bed with a maid, he has dark yearnings for bondage - something anyway. But I get ahead of myself - I didn't mind not really knowing this early in the book and there is so still so much to love.

The story moves on to Bath which now also includes Lydia's beau from ten years ago, Lewis Durrant, who has decided to marry someone to thwart his grasping heir, Hugh Hanley. Many hijinks ensue - balls, routs, picnics, etc. and all the while Lydia is saying she's being objective about Phoebe's beaus while really pushing one over the other because in her heart she knows what's right for Phoebe. And this is where it really fell apart for me. Lydia becomes downright unlikeable for the last third of the book. Her arrogance and blindsightedness are rampant - she's mean and rude to Lewis and she 's horrible to both of Phoebe's men. Her response to George Allerdyce's proposal was just baffling. I couldn't figure out his great sin - other than Lydia was too big of a dunderhead to notice what several other people had already pointed out to her. Anyway, after a lot of faffing around, Lydia finally gets her comeuppance and makes up with Lewis on the last 2 pages of the book. Yep, that's right, the last 2 pages. And I still wasn't clear on why she hadn't married him in the first place and why he'd carry a torch for 10 years. I wanted better for Lewis, I really did.

This novel had so much going for it that I was even more disappointed when I realized the lead character didn't have me on her side. Oh well, I guess I'm still looking for that next good read.