I think Wilson is simply incapable of gothic. I mean, it was all there: a hero in a remote house on a dangerous storm -swept cliff above the sea, with a dead wife and a son he couldn’t bear to have in a house that has no family portraits on the walls and traumatic secrets and the long ago tragic death of the heroine’s grandmother, who the heroine looks exactly like, and the hero is a bit fixated on ( she was his stepmother) and he also has a married girlfriend who tells the heroine in the first few pages that the hero is staying in the house ‘out of spite.’
Add to that a red and purple orphan girl and there should have been ghosts and murders and incest and crazy housekeepers but: no. The red and purple orphan girl may be too polite to ask a few nosy probing questions, but she’s not having any nonsense not of her own making.
Sophie, the red and purple orphan girl, had the flu. She’s also lost her job and her home and needs somewhere to live for the next 6 months, so she turns to NOT uncle Matthew, her dead father’s much younger stepbrother.
Sophie’s parents were archeologists killed in a landslide in Africa and Sophie didn’t care for them much. In their will they left her money if she immediately started some form of history related degree and Sophie got real cross at them for being sucky parents trying to control her beyond the grave and said no thanks and walked away from the money.
4 years later she’s 22 and getting ready to start university in September.
Will she, though? A lot can happen to a girl alone in a gothic house with a cranky sexy man who has a lot of secrets and is fascinated by red and purple and feistiness.
So Matthew writes bestsellers that have been made into movies and are full of graphic violence and sex, so he’s absolutely perfect for the role of gothic hero if only Sophie was at all interested in playing gothic heroine but she’s not. She wants to play romantic comedy heroine which is a head adjustment for poor old Matthew who spends much of the book baffled. And aroused but he hides that pretty well. He gets in a couple of punishing kisses but doesn’t go for Wilson’s other favourite: the boob grab. Or if he does, I missed it. I think the genre change really threw off his game.
He manages to keep a lid on most of it and gets comfortably into the zone of alpha jealous lover when confronting Sophie’s other potential romantic partners and he gets to be silky to one of them at least once, which I’m sure he enjoyed immensely. I have no patience for silky talk I think it’s ridiculous and I’ll tolerate it from Sara Craven, who is a Goddess, but no one else.
Anyway, I was trying the make the point that Matthew’s writing career is portable, and doesn’t need to be done in Cornwall. And when the reasoning behind why the son goes to boarding school comes out it’s also a very decent opportunity to find another school for the boy in a neighbourhood where they can buy a nice house that’s also close to where Sophie is at university and eventually come back to live in the wild Cornish place when she’s finished her study, and still spend most of the year there anyway, when no one is at school.
But look IT’s FINE. And sure, put a banner on this book that says ‘today’s woman’ and still give me a story about honourable intentions and virgins who are mistaken for whores because they live with unmarried men, because 1996 was 20 years ago and is basically still the Victorian era of HPlandia, and a whole lot of other stuff that’s just annoying. My fantasy is still that women get to do whatever they damn well like and for them to like more stuff than houses and babies. Which are great, but if you can have more, why not have more?
And a heroine who can hold her own against a cranky hero is not actually a revolutionary concept and none of this is Wilson’s fault. I’m sure she had nothing to do with ‘today’s woman’ as a marketing strategy and all she wanted was to invert the gothic trope, which she did in a book that was pretty fun.