cimorene

This is one of my mother's favourite Heyers and one which I'm quite fond of; and it's pretty unique in that it's an established relationship story, although not particularly unique in characterisation. The main premise is that the heroine, Nell (short for Helen, if you, like I was, were briefly stymied), and her husband, the Earl of Cardross, are newlyweds who fell in love at first sight, but they both believe the other is in it for convenience. The Earl is intelligent but a little too severe and fatherly, perhaps, being thirty to Nell's eighteen; and the ubiquitous Gambling-Brother-Related-B-Plot puts her in financial difficulties which she imagines will cause him to think she is lying when she confesses her love, if she reveals them to him.

In this instance the brother is actually something of a C-plot, and it's one of the most interesting Gambling Brother plots I've read, because the brother isn't as young, foolish, and otherwise tiresome as they often are. In this book, in fact, he's refreshingly down-to-earth and gets into a lot of catfights with the Hero's Bratty Sister B-Plot, who is a spoiled princess and determined to marry a stolid, boring, respectable young man of respectable but un-wealthy prospects. The catfights are pretty grand, which lends something to the Bratty Sister plot which the one in Devil's Cub lacks. But Devil's Cub is an overall more light-hearted and humourous book, with rather more ridiculous and fun developments on all sides and a good dash of adventure, rather than the all-London setting of Devil's Cub. (It's also not an established relationship story at all, but the Bratty Sister subplot is more than memorable!)

The more mature April Lady is fittingly more subtle, with the emotional thread woven through the dialogue and permutations of the plot, and the humour is of a quieter sort as well (but merely less to my taste).

On another note, Heyer has a habit of giving physical details about her heroines - something Austen, for example, never does - which mixes poorly with the publisher's program of using old artwork as the covers. Where the heroine of Arabella, for example, is particularly described as dark, we get this; and where the heroine of April Lady is meant to have a halo of cropped golden curls, we get this.