Orphan Bride

by Sara Seale

When Julian Dane's fiancee broke off their engagement because a severe injury had lessened his attractions for her, he said “I don't intend to remain in single blessedness... but this time I'll pick my wife from an orphanage and see that she has no preconceived ideas that interfere with mine.”

From Blacker's Orphanage, he selected Jennet Brown, for his experiment in moulding a wife, a girl who seemed entirely suitable, and carefully set about moulding her to fit his ideal pattern. But he had not allowed for Jennet's having a will of her own. But would Jennet play Galates to his Pygmalion, or had she hopes and dreams of her own?

Genres: Love, Fiction, Chick Lit, Harlequin Romance, Harlequin

Paperback

First published January 1, 1947

About the author

Sara Seale was the pseudonym used by Mary Jane MacPherson (d. 11 March 1974) and/or A.D.L. MacPherson (d. 30 October 1978), a British writing team who published over 45 romance novels from 1932 to 1971. Seale was one of the first Mills & Boon's authors published in Germany and the Netherlands, and reached the pinnacle of her career in the 1940s and 1950s, when they earning over £3,000/year. Many of Seale's novels revisited a theme of an orphaned heroine who finds happiness, and also employed blind or disfigured (but still handsome) heroes as standard characters.

Mary Jane MacPherson began writing at an early age while still in her convent school. Besides being a writer, MacPherson was also a leading authority on Alsatian dogs, and was a judge at Crufts.

Reviews

[Margo · Rating 1 out of 5]

Embittered by a failed romance, the H goes to the nearest orphanage and chooses out a 16-year-old he can groom to be the perfect wife. This was my favorite episode of To Catch a Predator.

[Kay · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 Stars ~ Jennet's nearly 17 when this story begins and all her life she's lived in the Blacker orphanage. One day a handsome young man with a detached look about him, came to select a girl to be a companion for his aunt. Of the five girls presented, Jennet was the only one who refused to look at him and take interest in what he might offer. When Julian asked her if she'd like to go live with his aunt and be adopted, she shyly replied "No". But Jennet seemed perfect and Julian made his choice. Having been jilted by his fiancee after an accident left him crippled, Julian had vowed that he wouldn't remain a bachelor for ever. That he'd chose for himself a wife that he could mold into the woman who would share his interests and bear his children. For Julian it was a great experiment, and the orphanage provided the ideal picking grounds.

Julian's Aunt Emily lives several hours from London in the country, and it's here that Jennet will begin her transformation from youth to young woman. Emily is a strange woman, caring for nothing more than the dogs she breeds, and she is agreeable to follow Julian's direction in how Jennet shall live. Julian shall make all the decisions on what Jennet shall wear, who Jennet may associate with, and what her day time pursuits may be. Jennet was raised to be grateful for the charity of others, and so she meekly went along with what was asked. She hoped that one day perhaps Aunt Emily and Julian might grow to be fond of her, for all her life she'd only one dream, and that was for someone to genuinely show her affection. But as the days passed into weeks, into months and then almost a year, it seemed that Jennet had to work very hard to please Julian. He seemed ill tempered and cold, though she understood that at his worst it was the pain in his leg that caused this. And when she learned that she was to one day become Julian's wife, she meekly accepted this. That is until Julian's friend Luke took an interest in her and showed her a life far more exciting than the one Julian offered.

Throughout this story, reference is made to Pygmalion who fell in love with the marble statue he created, Galatea. Julian honestly believes he can create for himself the perfect wife and remain emotionally detached. After the pain caused by his jilting fiancee and also by a deserting mother, he vowed never to get emotionally involved again. For Jennet following along is all she's known her entire life, for in the orphanage independent thought was frowned upon. Living with Aunt Emily, she works hard to learn all that Julian expects from her, keeping to herself her secret desires and thoughts. This frustrates Julian, for Jennet seems so animated when his friend Luke is around sharing with him experiences from the orphanage and glimpses of the girl she is, and yet for Julian she becomes nervous and shy and only responds when necessary. Of course, as Jennet matures she begins to fight back, surprising Julian.

Had Ms. Seale not given us Julian's thoughts, he would have been a hard hero to like. This story is obviously dated, first published in the 40's, when a man's arrogance to control all in his world could be excused. Jennet is a warm hearted girl who only wants to be shown affection and to be allowed to show it in return. There is a lot packed into this story and I found it quite compelling. The orphaned heroine is a favourite theme for Ms. Seale, and I've not found another author who can write it so emotionally as she could.

[Lede · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was so effed- up( granted it was first published in 1947).
35 year old man(with recently damaged leg and hence low self esteem, cause chorus girl fiancee dumped him; she dances and he can't anymore...:((.), he decides to pick a 16 year old from an orphanage to mould to wife perfection. That was so creepy, the girl/h is a child; she is scared, intimidated, bullied by "THE CREEP" and is trapped in the house he places her in to be groomed by creepy cousin and another relative who has an ongoing relationship with people only he can see and hear!
It's a vile and abusive relationship and apparently totally socially acceptable for the time it was written.
Thank god/ dess, stones, reptilians(whatever u worship) for these vintage mills and boons, they actually give a more honest perspective of what life was like for average white women(multiple the degradation and abuse by a million for women from different race groups) back then compared to more esteemed literary books predominantly written by men.

[Anuradha · Rating 3 out of 5]

A guardian - ward story that is stilted, fun-less, not romantic in the least. Touching in parts and dragging in parts.

The girl this time is a 16 year old orphan. The guy is a cripple, approaching 30. If you can't swallow these totally patriarchal and old fashioned tales, then this one is not for you. Massive age difference, a naïve girl being manipulated by the hero, the hero being totally bossy and unemotional. The girl being mousy for most part and sagely wise on rare occasions.

The guy is soured with love when he met with an accident and smashed up his leg. His fiancé walked away and her brutal desertion has sworn him off from love.

But he does want the normal things, a wife, kids, a family life. Never mind the love part. So he comes up with a brilliant plan. Let me get a helpless mousy girl from an orphanage and groom her to my tastes. Then marry her. That would ensure my wife fits my expectations perfectly !@#!@!@!

Crazy plan, but the way he sets about doing it - is quite honest. No subterfuge, he asks his aunt to adopt the girl. He cares for her well being, and informs her about the marriage plans quite early on in the story. But he doesn't coerce or demand anything.

He is just too much like the governess of a 7 year old, instead of the prospective husband of a 17 year old. "Eat your greens", "Don't bite your nails", "Improve your grammar" !!!!!! The girl is obviously irritated and furious about being treated like a child. But the concept of being indebted to your benefactor is too deeply ingrained in her. So she doesn't revolt easily.

There is a customary presence of a few OMs, just to show the contrast between how the girl behaves with the boring hero and the gay, light hearted OMs.

Finally, enough is enough. She has had enough of his kindness and silly tyranny. All she wants is a simple, affectionate relationship. She does glimpse that with the hero in few unguarded moments. But not enough to hold her back.

So she runs away, back to her orphanage and orphan friends. And yes, the hero comes looking for her, as expected.

This time , he is ready to drop his guard. Ready to love. Ready to set her free, if that's what she wishes. And she promptly says no, that's not what I wish at all. So they reunite, this time as equals. HEA.

Not very poignant or memorable. But nothing revolting either. Typical, unremarkable 3 stars.

[Noël Cades · Rating 4 out of 5]

What I love about Sara Seale is the unashamed absurdity of her plots. Here, we have a man in his mid-thirties, who due to an injury, bitterness and heartbreak (if he has a heart – it’s never apparent) decides to go to an orphanage and pick out a girl to marry. He then chooses the least attractive and willing girl offered to him.

I don’t know how often this happened in the 1940s, but I’m betting not terribly frequently.

We’re in classic Sara Seale territory here. Julian Dane is tall, dark, glowering, handsome, in his mid thirties but frequently described as looking older.

Jennet is sixteen, as innocent as the morn, and right after Julian finally reveals his intentions to marry her – “in a year or so, when you’re older”:

…he put his hand under her chin, raising her face to his. “You are only a child, after all,” he said, and the first hint of tenderness she had known in him touched his mouth.

Jennet is instructed to call him “Cousin Julian” for half the book, then struggles to switch back to just “Julian”. I’m surprised Seale just didn’t go the whole hog and have him titled “Uncle Julian” (let’s not forget The Third Uncle).

Julian is controlling and overbearing throughout. He does all he can to “mould” Jennet to his requirements, continually lecturing her and and ordering various tutoring for her. Because of his leg injury, he refuses to allow her to learn to dance, swim or ride since he can’t engage in those activities. We’re repeatedly told that he chooses all Jennet’s clothes, which presumbly includes “her new silk underclothes”.

“I want to make you my sort of person. As you see, I’m somewhat restricted to the pursuits I can choose, so it’s better that we care for the same things.”

Even his friends accuse him of being “governessy” and an intellectual snob, and let’s not forget that this is a man whose previous romantic entanglement/engagement was with a shallow chorus girl.

The one, slim redeeming feature of this story is that Jennet does get a slight chance to experience other men and independence – Julian naturally freaks out each time. However, he never really gets his comeuppance and there is never any real sense that he feels sexually attracted to her, nor she to him. This is Mills & Boon and the 1940s, but Elinor Glyn and others were managing to get a bit of passion in by the early 1900s. Chaste is okay: this is frigid.

Jennet’s emotions towards Julian are a mix of gratitude, pity and subservience. Stockholm Syndrome might not have been defined by 1940, but this is it in spades.

Another theme that we frequently get in Sara Seale’s work is that of a young girl having to distance herself from “common people” – working class friends that she has to disassociate herself from as she grows up. I’m not sure why Seale makes such a point of this in so many of her novels. I’m struggling to think of a Seale novel I’ve read where there isn’t a “lower class childhood-friend/suitor” character.

One theme here that isn’t included, which is odd for a genre Romance such as Mills & Boon, is the Other Woman. There’s nearly always some glamorous, devious older woman who wants the hero for herself. Not here. It might have given Julian some humanity if we could have seen him react to such a character. Instead he’s a cold stick from start to end.

“I haven’t been lucky with women too date. They expect too much, and give too little.”

and:

She had to sit on her hands to prevent them from touching him, remembering that he disliked emotion.

and he even admits that he “never really liked women.”

[MissKitty · Rating 3 out of 5]

I dont really know how to rate this. Once again its a coming of age story, low on romance but very well written.

The H was really a beast at the beginning, so controlling of the poor little girl it was almost abuse. He didn't even allow her any friends. For most of the story i quite disliked him and only felt bad for him towards the end when it seemed even his friend, whom he trusted, betrayed him as well.

[Realini Ionescu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Orphan Bride by Sara Seale – this is one of The 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read, included in the Love Section
9 out of 10


This is a remarkable, wonderful novel which has only about forty ratings and maybe twenty reviews on Goodreads (now we can add one to these numbers) an incredible fact, if we look at what Dan Brown, other lesser authors have – millions of ratings and multitudes of opinions expressed – it is a pity that such wondrous work goes unnoticed

Orphan Bride takes the Pygmalion myth and somehow tells it again, with Julian Dane in the role of the sculptor, and Jennet Brown would have the part of Galatea – in the old legend, Pygmalion creates this beautiful statue and falls in love with it, only because she is made of stone, he asks the gods to give her life and they oblige
In psychology, there is The Pygmalion Effect – researchers went into schools in California to study what happens if they tell teachers that three students will perform so well in the next few months, without extra classes, or attention – the results were splendid, because the professors believed in those young people

Julian Dane had had a fiancée, Kitty, and everything was Wine and Roses, halcyon days, until he suffers a plane accident and one leg is affected so badly that they would consider amputating it, if the pain does not end, but what is worse, is the reaction of the loved one, who informs the injured hero that she will marry an American
Devasted, the hero (who is clearly an anti-hero for those who apply the present day, Woke or Cancel Culture standards and will see him as an abusive, dominant chauvinist pig) decides he will take an Orphan Bride and mold her, educate her in such a way so that ‘she has no preconceived ideas that interfere with his

When he visits the orphanage, he does not say he wants to marry the girl he takes, but that she will be taken to his aunt, where she will work, and he is presented with four (if not more…checking now, there were five in all) girls, all of them eager to get out of the place, except for one, who is in the end the ‘lucky one’
The girl is only sixteen, so that would be rather impossible in the present, if there would not be statutory rape to charge, the pained main character is not attempting any intimacy with his pick, most laws would prohibit something like this, at least in the ‘civilized world’, there are plenty of places where this practice is encouraged

Jennet is to live with aunt Emily and Homer, a beekeeper with awkward manners, and get visits from the man she is to marry…she does not know anything about this project, ergo she is wondering what was the object of her adoption, especially after she sees that she is not to work, on the contrary, when she helped the maid, she was rebuked

For an adolescent, staying with people that are twice as old is no arcadian dream, however spoiled she is in terms of care, she has no duties, expect learning some things, but the isolation and lack of affection would take a great toll, and she looks for validation when she meets some children, and then their mother and older brother
This situation has reminded me of Love In Infant Monkeys https://realini.blogspot.com/2021/08/... by Lydia Millet, which looks at the experiments made on monkeys, mothers and babies, the latter had been separated from the former and then given surrogate parents to see the effects

The research, which was so viciously cruel, demonstrated that warmth and a feeling of intimacy prevailed, the poor little ones would choose a cloth over food, preferring a wire ‘mother’ covered in textile, which would resemble in small part the estranged adult, and those without any semblance of affection would die soon
Jennet goes to the house of the children she has met on her walks, where the mother is ill, and the orphan helps and they soon become good friends, especially with the nineteen years old Frankie, who becomes infatuated with the generous girl – alas, Julian finds about this and he is infuriated forbidding any further contact

When Jennet travels to London, where Julian has a flat, she is met by Luke Fenton, supposedly Julian’s best friend – Thomas Mann https://realini.blogspot.com/2023/06/... has a short story in which he looks at ‘big words’, like love and friends and concludes that they are extant only in art
Indeed, Julian is actually courting, trying to seduce the Orphan that his ami wants to marry, and the results could have been cataclysmic, it is not just this flirting Cassanova that is to blame, Julian has mishandled the relationship with his Galatea, to say the least, in the present, he would face charges, surely

We must remember though that the wondrous author is a woman, and surely, she has been influenced, constrained by the views of her time, but there are eternal messages here, such as the cliché ‘love conquers all’, or to quote Shakespeare ‘let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments’ and it is a glorious read at times
I was enraptured often, and so fervently wanting to know what happens, would they have a clash and everything goes up in smoke, would she run with the shallow, hedonistic Luke, was Julian so hard on the Orphan that she is lost forever?

[Lynn Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

First published in 1940s. I read the 1970s reissue under Mills and Boon Classics range.

[Jiae Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5 An odd one to evaluate. The book is a product of its times and contains problematic content in the context of modern times including the intentional grooming and emotional neglect of a teenager by a moody, Byronic hero 30-something year-old. That said, taking that aside, I enjoyed the writing style -- it's fun to read with nuanced observations and descriptions that delight.

[Neri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cannot stop laughing at this premise and how messed up it is but it's not any worse than "The Third Uncle" (by this same author). Anyway, I love Sara Seale and I love to believe all her heroines come from the same orphanage that should definitely be shut down (I think they let a teenager adopt a girl in another of Sara Seale's books, lol). This is basically the "wife husbandry" trope taken more literally than most guardian-ward stories.

"I'm just waiting for my wife to grow up."
— Grover Cleveland, after a reporter asked him why he wasn't married yet. (The quote is unconfirmed, but events bear it out.)

[Karen-Leigh · Rating 3 out of 5]

When Julian Dane's fiancee broke off their engagement because a severe injury had lessened his attractions for her, he said “I don't intend to remain in single blessedness... but this time I'll pick my wife from an orphanage and see that she has no preconceived ideas that interfere with mine.”From Blacker's Orphanage, he selected Jennet Brown, for his experiment in moulding a wife, a girl who seemed entirely suitable, and carefully set about moulding her to fit his ideal pattern. But he had not allowed for Jennet's having a will of her own. But would Jennet play Galates to his Pygmalion, or had she hopes and dreams of her own?

[Tia · Rating 2 out of 5]

The novel was just too damn weird, the hero was kind of an idiot and the ending was, well beyond words. hilarious but not very good at times.