How the Woman Eclipsed the Rake

A week ago I finished reading Sarah MacLean’s Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake, and I’ve been raving about the novel to everyone. Most of my friends refuse to listen after my first sentence identifies this book as a romance, but see, this novel -- though a romance -- is one of those really great books which I don’t just read, I live.

Chapter One finds Callie sitting on the shelf: at 28, she’s an old, plump maid and nobody asks her to dance anymore. She sits with the other unmarried ladies and suffers their comments, like this one from her Aunt Beatrice: “Have you considered a diet of boiled eggs and cabbage? I hear it works wonders. Then you would be less... well, more.”

I don’t think Aunt Beatrice would have appreciated the direction in which Callie takes her suggestion to be “well, more.” Callie makes a list of projects which she would like to try: kiss someone passionately, watch a duel, learn to fence, smoke a cherut and drink whiskey among others. And she sets out to accomplish her list, finding an unexpected ally in confirmed rake Gabriel whom she had always loved from a distance. As you can imagine, Gabriel assists her with the fulfillment of her dreams while punctuating each of their adventures with a lot of excitement of the bedroom kind.

The kissing scenes in this novel are fabulous, each different from the one before. I got swept off my feet, left swooning, lost in the atmosphere of the book. The ballroom, the secret corners, Gabriel’s bedroom with the piano inside where he secretly plays to himself. I could see Callie and Gabriel from across the room, partially hidden by dancing couples, kissing passionately in an alcove. Blush. Swoon.

I always loved a rake. William Blake commented on Paradise Lost that “Milton was on Satan’s side and didn’t know it?” I loved Satan! And the devil’s in a rake, right? Rakes are dangerous and sexually thrilling. Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century British Lit is teeming with libertines: Lovelace in Richardson’s Pamela, Don Juan, Willoughby of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. The poet Lord Byron was a well-known playboy.

But in Nine Rules I fell in love with Callie. Gabriel is mysterious and desirable. He understands Callie and though he sometimes complains, does not prevent her from trying to fulfill her list. But he is just a sidekick, important to the novel only in as much as he supports Callie’s bid for adventure. Throughout the novel Callie shines, like a bright light that leads the way, freeing up herself and the other characters from the one-sided norms that rule their society, gently, kindly, peacefully without unnecessary noise, declarations or speeches.

So yes, I know this is a romance, and you, my dear reader, might be thinking that romance equals junk. But this one romance features the inner diamond of a woman in a way many novels try to and fail. And it is worth the time.

Bad Boys, Bad Girls

Yesterday I read a twitter discussion about the current lack of bad girls in YA fiction. It got me thinking about my early love of eighteenth century British novels, in which bad boys, or rakes, as they were called, abound.

To me, the ultimate bad boy is Lovelace of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. Smooth-talking to outright lying, Lovelace maneuvers his way into the heart of the sweet, innocent Clarissa and then betrays her. Poor Clarissa. For one thousand pages she is almost forced to marry a repulsive older man and kidnapped by Lovelace. In the second one thousand pages of the novel, after Lovelace (shockingly!) rapes her, she slowly and agonizingly dies. Lovelace’s remorse and his offers to marry her fail to change her mind. Life without her virtue is unthinkable. We the readers know the underlying tragic truth: Clarissa loves Lovelace despite his unworthiness, and he, dishonorable though he proves himself to be, loves her back.

Another Richardson novel, Pamela, features an immorality and innocence clash, but the end is happier. Pamela, a servant in a young man’s house, succeeds in overcoming her rakish master’s advances, and he finally marries her.

Clarissa and Pamela are moralistic tales meant to teach girls the danger of giving up their virtue through the use of characteristic bad boy good girl stereotypes. But not all eighteenth century characters were written under these premises. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defore (the author of Robinson Crusoe) centers around a bad girl. The title of the novel gives an idea of how bad Moll is: “Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once was to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon....” Moll’s exciting (yet by eighteenth century standards quite depraved) free-spirit adventures sadly end by the novel’s finale. She marries her last husband and is reunited with her brother and their son.

John Cleland’s eighteenth century novel Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure is another example of a bad girl novel whose main character, Fanny Hill, is a happy and successful prostitute. While this novel does end on a redeeming note (Fanny marries her first love and settles down), it is filled to the brim with modern and sexually explicit descriptions which Fanny gives in a straight-forward, clear and unembarrassed voice.

It is possible that readers find bad boys more attractive than bad girls. I am not qualified to judge. But I admit I did always like Lovelace better than Moll. Then again, it might just be because Moll deserts all eight of her children in the novel. Lovelace, though, always struck me as a tragic character. He does not realize till it is too late that what he really wanted was Clarissa’s love, and desperate and inconsolably remorseful, he allows himself to be killed in a duel with Clarissa’s cousin. How sad is that?