Angel in Scarlet

by Jennifer Wilde, T.E. Huff

Angela Howard was the toast of London -- a breathtaking vision every woman envied and every man longed to possess. Few would have dreamed this violet-eyed beauty was the precocious child of a country schoolmaster... the feisty girl who had spurned Lord Clinton Meredith, the "fairy tale prince", to surrender her innocence to Hugh Bradford, his illegitimate brother... the young woman who had come to London with nothing but a broken heart -- and a fierce determination to survive.

Now she was a celebrated actress; immortalized on canvas by Gainsborough; adored by Jamie Lambert, the playwright who made her his star; desired by the golden-haired lord obsessed with making her his lady... and still tormented with longing for the man who had branded her very soul with his passion, and who has now returned to reawaken past splendors of a love he means to reclaim....

Genres: Historical Romance, Romance, Historical, Historical Fiction, Fiction, Georgian, British Literature

600 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Jennifer Wilde is a pseudonym of T. E. Huff (Thomas Elmer Huff). He also wrote under the names Edwina Marlow and Beatrice Parker.

Reviews

[Sandi *~The Pirate Wench~* · Rating 4 out of 5]

Re-Read 4 1/2 Stars this time...but still enjoyed



There's not many Historical Romance books from the 70's-80's where the main character really stands out & grabs & draws me right away into their story, most times it takes some warming up for me.
But our "heroine Angie Howard (Angel) sure did for me.
She had me laughing out loud from beginning to the end.
Her story is told in the 1st person so you really get to know not only Angie herself but her thoughts & views on things and how she looks at life, which makes it all the more entertaining.
Angie is a "backwoods village girl" who's feisty, humorous, and a down right blunt spoken girl.
She wants more out of life than to end up married & staying in her village.
Angie has dreams of being someone someday, of seeing what the world has to offer.
As we read & watch this feisty girl grow up and go threw the changes in her life and the relationships with 3 very different men.

Hugh Bradford: "the bastard" Lord Meredith's son rightfully the real heir but disowned by his own father.
Hugh is Angie's first love, he took her innocence and left her wit a broken heart, but with a fierce will to carry on.

Clinton Meredith: nephew to Lord Meredith who inherits his title, a rake, womaniser, gambler,and a scandal to the family.
Clinton is obsessed with Angie and will do anything to have her.

James Lambert: he took her from the backroom of the theatre as a seamstress and made her into the famous actress of London..would he be able to also heal the hurt in her heart?

Throughout the story we meet actual personages and the historical "tid-bits" were well done.
A bawdy, romp-page turning tale!
Lots of excitement, great characters, beautiful love scenes (as well as funny ones)
A non stop read that never lagged and when I thought I had it figured out a new twist was added.
A very surprising ending, not one I expected but was pleased it ended that way.
Still going to hang on to my copy :)
I would also highly recommend this authors other book
which I enjoyed just as much.

[Sarah Mac · Rating 2 out of 5]

Though slightly better than Wilde/Huff's Dare to Love , this isn't to my taste. At all. I yield after 200 pages of plodding plot that left me caring more about the slutty stepsister than the primary heroine & her yawn-worthy narrative. Boring, boring, BORING.




Important safety tip: If you're determined to write a 600-page bodice ripper, stuff needs to happen. And by "stuff" I'm referring to emotional highs & lows.

Not every ripper needs to be Pleasure's Daughter in terms of plotting WTFery -- I daresay the universe would implode if that was the norm :P -- but repeating the same fill-in-the-blank descriptions of clothes in every scene doesn't make a legitimate plot, nor does picking over every mundane moment of your equally mundane emotional development. This heroine (Angie) had a bit more individuality than Whatshername in DTL, but the voice was still flat & meandering. For 200 pages I slogged through "I love my father, I hate Hugh Bradford, I love my father, I love Hugh Bradford, I don't hate my stepmother, I love my father, I love Hugh Bradford, I might hate my stepmother" in hopes that my attention would be hooked. Such was not the case.

As if the flat voice & saccharine purple sex0rs wasn't enough, Wilde/Huff insisted on using the same formulaic costume porn at every opportunity. The ever-popular waistcoat with [__color__] embroidery + [__color__] silk neckcloth was a holdover from DTL. Another old fave: off-the-shoulder sleeves (or) puffed sleeves + low-cut bodice, though some ladies were blessed with snug waists + low necklines (either modestly low or so low her/my nipples were almost visible) in a variety of shades & fabrics. Thankfully we were spared the omnipresent French roll of DTL, but this was happily replaced with glossy chestnut waves on the heroine & [__number__] of ringlets arranged down the back...and that's not to mention endless discussions of Angie's oh-so-fugly wide mouth + high cheekbones that every male wants to hump like a fiend, despite her being plain as a mud fence compared to other female specimens.

(Are your eyes glazing over? Yeah, I don't blame you.)

The final nail in the coffin was a scene that was virtually lifted from Wilde/Huff's earlier gothic Come to Castlemoor (1970), which I recently read. Seeing as how Angel in Scarlet was published in 1986, I can only assume the author forgot he'd already used this brilliant emotive Harlequin-esque scene of the alpha asshat stealing the heroine's food from her plate/lunch bag, eating it himself, & staring at her while she chewed the remainder under his supervision...because surely he didn't assume a change of pseudo would erase Castlemoor from existence.

...Or maybe it was such a brilliant emotive brilliantly emotive scene that it deserved to be repeated. Right?



Nope, he's not. And neither am I.


Since I enjoyed Castlemoor, I'll not dismiss this author's pulp backlist out of hand. But anything longer than 200 pages...nope. I'm done.

[Wendy, Lady Evelyn Quince · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Book – Angel In Scarlet

Jennifer Wilde, aka Mr. Thomas E. Huff, wrote a few bodice rippers before writing romances that weren’t bodice rippers but not quite traditional romances either.

Angel In Scarlet isn’t a bodice ripper. It’s a Georgian-Era chick-lit. This is a hard one to categorize. It’s not just a romance, but more of a heroine’s journey through life and her relationships with several men she meets along the way.

The Plot

Angel in Scarlet begins when our heroine Angela Howard is a child. At twelve years old, she meets Hugh, the man who will haunt her for her entire life. They have a strange first meeting: she’s a peeping Tom trying to catch an eyeful of some action, when Hugh, who’s 16, discovers her then gives her a spanking as a discipline!

Angela grows up with her cruel sisters and mother. Poor Angie, she’s so unattractive with her rich, chestnut hair, violet-gray eyes, and enormous boobies. Who would ever love her?

She goes through ups and downs. Angela carves her way into society, falls in love, and has her heart broken. She then moves to London to make it big as an actress. She gets married and is widowed, her heart broken once more.

Three men vie for Angela’s love: Hugh Bradford, the bastard son of a nobleman, whose passion for Angela is surpassed only by his desire for legitimacy & a title. There’s the arrogant womanizer, Lord Clinton Meredith, Hugh’s half-brother, who is more than what he seems. And last, the famous playwright, James “Jamie” Lambert, has a tumultuous professional and personal career with Angela.

View Spoilers Below

In the end, Angela picked the last man I thought she should be with. It broke the rules to end up with the guy she did, but that’s what Mr. Huff was good at, breaking the rules. I can’t forget how shocked I was at the end of Love Me, Marietta.

So it was the “right” choice because the man she loved could never be content with just loving her.

Past the age of thirty, a person shouldn’t blame their parents for their shortcomings, yet Hugh had a rough childhood. I couldn’t fault him. His life was so difficult, and he had nothing except his dreams. They were absolutely shattered at the end. He got what he wanted, but it wasn’t worth it without Angela.

Still, I felt bad for him. I guess that’s the mark of a good writer if you can make your “villain” sympathetic. He was single-minded and wrong, but Angela was so harsh because he wanted to get his fortune. Finished! Angela, you broke that man’s heart! He was cruel and misguided, but he loved you. After what happened to Clinton, she had every right to be. Clinton was not the man for her, but I loved him. He was so sweet (plus a blond) and got teary-eyed when he made his exit.

As for Jamie, he was a great character, but Angela lived with him for years and never realized she loved him until they were through. Certainly not the kind of epic love you’d expect in a romance. I wish Hugh hadn’t turned into a jerk for her to have to make that decision.

The scene where Jamie revealed his true feelings for Angela was fantastic, and if it had been more of those, I don’t think I’d feel as conflicted.

Let’s Get It On

Wilde never met a word that wasn’t a friend. Adverbs, adjectives, subjective clauses, it’s all there, and then some! One particular passage struck out to me as ridiculously cartoony:

We ate slowly, looking at each other the whole while, silent, anticipating, savoring the sensations building, mounting inside. Utterly enthralled I watched him eat chicken, his strong white teeth tearing the flesh apart, and it was thrilling, tantalizing. I observed the way his neck muscles worked when he swallowed his wine, and that was thrilling, too and I watched with fascination as his large brown hand reached out, fingers wrapping around a fuzzy golden-pink peach, clutching it. He took up a knife and carefully peeled the peach and divided it into sections and ate them one by one, his brown eyes devouring me as he did so. The tip of his tongue slipped out and slowly licked the peach juice from his lips…

I think this was supposed to be a sensually-tinged scene like the one out of the film “Barry Lyndon.” As for me, I was reminded of the “3rd Rock From the Sun” Thanksgiving episode where Harry and Vicki have leftover foreplay, eating turkey legs and dipping their fingers in gravy. Then Harry puts a turkey carcass on his head, and the loving begins.



Final Analysis of Angel in Scarlet

This was the story of the rise of actress Angela Howard and her (not too many) loves.

At 600 pages long, Jennifer Wilde’s Angel in Scarlet runs a tad overlong. That might have been due to Wilde’s penchant for purple prose, clothes porn, and food porn. Sex porn? Nah, Wilde uses a stream of consciousness perspective and euphemisms for love scenes. Hardly porn.

Mr. Wilde could have cut out 100 pages of description. I didn’t need to know the details of every outfit worn by every character in every scene.

Although I enjoyed it, I’m not 100% certain Angela made the right decision in the end.

I wanted to hate this, but something about Huff’s writing pulled me in. Yes, it’s as purple as grape jelly and full of run-on sentences, but for some reason, I can tolerate it more than Kathleen Woodiwiss’ prose. The tension of not knowing who Angela was going to choose and the resulting emotions when she did are feelings I won’t forget.

3.88 stars

[Vellini · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, I never read Jennifer Wilde's books before because I always thought that his BRs were Rosemary Rogers style, I see it's not (at least this one isn't).

I liked it, even though the book wasn't a typical BR. None of the male charaters was mean (in BR style anyway), the h had some brain, and the ending was different from the usual HEA, serves to us in a hurry in BRs after 500+ pages.

The author succeeded in making me wonder who the H of the story really was. I'll just say I was team Clinton!

I had to skim some passages, there was too much details and I was bored!

I'll definitely be reading this author's more conventional BRs

[Grace Peck]

“Are you going to be difficult about this?”
“I’m going to be impossible”


OKAY. so yes, these books have not aged well and contain a plethora of “problematic” ideals and language that I would absolutely be calling out if it were written today and the author still living. Hence why I’m just not going to rate this, though I have to admit I do enjoy Wilde’s books, they are pretty entertaining, despite the sexism, misogyny, racism, historical inaccuracies, etc.

That being said, good old Tom here has been dead, long before I was born, and probably couldn’t care less what people think of his books 30,40 yrs later. Examine older works with a critical lenses, yes, but I also think it’s silly to moralize on things in books that I think we all as intelligent adults understand is wrong.

We all know that consent is mandatory, that when a woman says no she means it, and you should ALWAYS marry the man who is NICE to you and listens to what you actually want and is also a Lord who buys you gowns and is nice to your friends, etc (jk on the last part but you get the idea).

I’m also not going to condescend to older readers and assume they don’t know this as well, as I am very bored with the idea that women in the 70s and 80s were dumb dumbs who liked being abused because of the books they read and just read “grandma porn”. Men have been abusing women since the beginning of fucking time, and it sure is shit NOT because of bodice rippers and other romance novels.

So with my soap box aside, again, idk why I like these books, but I do, they are fast paced and have interesting plots, despite the recycling of tropes and characters Wilde uses in literally every single book of his I’ve read. Like not joke, if you’ve read one of his books, you will know the set up for every single other one. All he changes is the time period and the hair color of the heroine. I would t necessarily recommend these to people, but if you happen across them, I’d check it out just to see for yourself.

Also the covers (the old covers) of these books are absolutely beautiful, I would love to find an og copy of this for the cover alone, I like the love’s tender fury too.

Also spoilers:

I am SO glad she didn’t end up with Hugh - what a fucking BORING asshole! If you’re going to be an asshole male lead, at least be an interesting one! I didn’t really like Jamie either, but at least he was somewhat interesting. Hugh sucked, and what he did to Chilton or whatever his name was was abhorrent. He didn’t really love Angela, because if he had, he would never have done what he did.

[Nikki Golden · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful trashy novel I picked up for 50 cents at the local used bookstore when I was a teen. What a great plot but even better, it has great descriptions of clothing, food and locale. I read EVERY book Jennifer Wilde wrote; then I found out it was a man writing under a pseudonym. Doesn't ruin it at all for me, though. He's still a great romance novelist.

[Lysti Cannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first steamy romance at 13 and still have it tucked up on a shelf for future enjoyment.

[Cecilia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this when I was thirteen. It was one of the first large novels I'd ever read and I have to say, eighteen years later I still appreciate the story and how the author didn't make it your standard romance novel where boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, boy and girl live happily ever after. There is love, heartbreak and a woman learning to live for herself and not just for the love of a guy. I want to read it again actually. Definitely a good read!

[AlexandraB95 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Her liaison with heros ended badly

heros?

first 1.hugh

2.Jamie

3.a second chance with Hugh

4.Clinton Meredith

and 5.a second chance with Jamie


While many readers gave this book a high rating, I kept asking myself where's the romance?

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book. Very racy though and sexually graphic. Not what I expected when I bought it, because it did not have a cover. It was still really good though and kept me on the edge of my seat.

[S · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well. My review might be a little (read, very) partial owing to the fact that I absolutely love Jennifer Wilde (Tom E. Huff, actually) but Angel In Scarlet was such a disappointing book in terms of the plot that it made me a little cold.
The narrative was not bad but the heroine was quite similar as that of Once More, Miranda or They Call Her Dana. Also, it was annoying how Angie thought she wasn't beautiful AT ALL.
Next came the heroes. One thing I never liked about Wilde's books is multiple heroes with the heroine ending up with the man I hated the most. Keeping true to the tradition, here too Angie ends up with the biggest clout and the most idiot of them all. Not quite the ending you want to see after going through around 300 pages. The writing and the description was usual Wilde which was wonderful!
So all in all, this was a good read but not a satisfying one. I also would like to know, why, oh why, does the author have such an obsession with volatile, artistic men?

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surprisingly great, for Old Skool. Reminiscent of Skye O'Malley, in that she had more than one lover over the course of the book and handled her own shit, but without the side of rape. I kept expecting bad stuff to happen, but it didn't go at all the way I expected. Angel (Angela "Angie" Howard) keeps a firm grip on her sensibilities, owns her choices and feelings, and grows as a character. Also, as a theater-adjacent nerd, I thoroughly enjoyed all of the drama and backstage action with the actors.

[Julie Dickerson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was one of my first trashy romance novels back in the day. I must've been 13 or so when I read it, and I still remember the story almost 20 yrs later! Found it at a garage sale and re-read it, enjoying the trashiness all over again. Sure, it's not going to win any literary awards, but sometimes you just need a guilty pleasure :)

[carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful Angel.

The thing I loved most was showing you can love more than one person. First love is not always the lasting love.

[Beverly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't think I would but I loved this book! It was sitting on my "hmm maybe" shelf but was inadvertently uploaded to my tablet with some other books. I was sucked in right from the beginning and only put it down for bathroom and snack breaks.

[Tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars. Not that steamy but characters are well-developed and much more believable than most romance books. I love when books span a long amount of time and this one follows Angela through many stages of her life.

[Jen]

DNF’d at about 50%. This book was so unwieldy in its verbosity that I couldn’t tell what was relevant to plot and what was just there to point out that the FMC was “not like other girls”.

Format: second hand mass market paperback

[Gift Chioma · Rating 1 out of 5]

If its possible to give zero star, I would. This is just horrible. Its practically the same as they call her dana. Wasted hours

[Jena]

Does anyone have safety spoilers for this, please?

[Jessica O · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the first romance novel I ever read when I was a teenager, and I loved it so much then. I also loved it so much now.

[Mari]

Dnf

[Tapa in lovezone]

Note to me - Lots of men. The h is giggling like ball from one men to other. Avoid.

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was good overall, but it started to remind me of all his other works. I mean, there were quite a few similarities to They call her Dana and the Marietta Danvers trilogy. All the male roles and her becoming an actress, falling in love with a playwright, and even the bonbon reference, love triangles, ending up with the playwright afterall, etc. It started to get boring though towards the end, but it was okay.

[Janice · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pros: lovable supporting characters, delightful narration/voice of heroine, good writing style, kept me guessing (expect toward the end things got very predictable/cliche)

Cons: read this as an e-book so wasn't expecting it to be so lengthy (and thus didn't get a handle of the pace of the story), sort of just plods along after the first half, what's with all the description of the clothes?, obvious repetition of words and turns of phrase (a pet peeve of mine)

[Tabitha (Bows & Bullets Reviews) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a very refreshing romance novel where you get to see the heroine grow up. She goes through 3 different relationships and for once, none of the guys are assholes, so you kind of feel bad for them when it ends. It has the perfect ending. It is really good and I adored it.

[Marisa]

OK, this is one of the first "trashy" novels I read as a 12-ish-year-old (then re-read) and I remain surprised at how much this story has stuck with me. The historical tidbits are great and have proven useful! I might need to find this again and see if I'm still drawn in.

[Keri Fry · Rating 5 out of 5]

first historical romance i read very good loved the charcters

[KD · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adventure from the git go. Great book!

[Coco · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was still in love with Jennifer Wilde's novels so of course I had to read it.. and I loved it!

[Poise · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cant remember details of the story... it was a good read for me. Took a famous quote from it... still hanging unto that deep line after over ten years of reading this book. A fan!