Amy Walsh, A Misplaced Beauty (Kindle 2021)
A Victorian romance—a morality tale of married love, spiritual growth and redemption
It’s 1882. Miss Georgina Huxington is the toast of the London season three years running, and she has refused suitor after suitor, even the conceited Lord Bartron. With her younger sisters now coming out, she realises her popularity is an impediment to their potential success. She determines to accept the next proposal she receives.
Malcolm, marquis of Birmingham, has admired her from the corners of the ballroom at Spencer House, and tries his luck, sending her father a letter. To his shock, she accepts. Her mother and sisters warn her that while the marquis has a reputation for kindness, he is, nevertheless, ‘portly’.
She first sets eyes on him as she walks down the aisle, when she discovers that he is PORTLY. He is tetchy and seems to take offence at everything she says. They agree to sleep separately on the first night, and the second, and the third. The awkwardness persists.
Enter Malcolm’s nephew, the handsome Charles, and he is inappropriately flirtatious, matched by Malcolm’s increased surliness. The marriage goes from bad to worse, but Georgina determines to win back her husband’s love. There is tragedy among the tenants, but Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon brings them both into God’s love and love of each other.
The last 15 pages are Georgina’s diary, which I would have preferred sprinkled in as excerpts amidst the rest of the text, or left out, as it doesn’t add much.
This is along the lines of other Victorian romances—mostly concerned with the prospects of eligible upper-class ladies in an age when the bride and groom typically knew nothing about each other apart from their lineages. Having been trained to be superficial and witty at balls, they are unskilled at conducting real, intimate discussions with each other. The conflict theme involves discovering the reasons for the marriage’s success or failure.
With Austen, one has the diversion of exceptionally beautiful language, and the characters are as concerned with lofty matters—pride, prejudice, sense, sensibility—and how these conflict with societal expectations, as they are with gentlemen’s real estate and income. Here, at first, we think this is simply a story about how a husband and wife can misunderstand each other. She is stuck, thinking—’Can I love him even though he’s fat?’ ‘How can I enter the marital bed when I feel so uncomfortable and nervous?’ He is stuck, thinking—’Can a lady so beautiful and refined love a country bumpkin like me?’ ‘How can I sustain my desire when I just saw that glint of disgust in her eye?’
We begin to see that it is a morality tale about the benefits of setting aside pride and vanity for the higher spiritual state of ‘freedom of Grace’ and ‘laying one’s problems before the Throne’ of God. Walsh writes convincingly about the experience of religious conversion, and even as a non-Christian, I empathised with Georgina’s spiritual journey and gained something from it.
This book is the first in a series, as we follow the four Huxington sisters in their quest to find husbands.
Susie Helme 
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