Friday's Child by Georgette Heyer

[lightreads]

Friday's Child by Georgette Heyer

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Oh God, this was so uncomfortable. It's one of the ones that starts with a marriage of convenience, and then the romance slowly develops after. Which first of all is not my kink (and if anyone who digs it can dissect the appeal of the kink for me, I'd love to hear it, because several people have tried and it has never worked). But also, this heroine is so sheltered and young and naïve, it is just *twitches*.

It's supposed to be about them growing up together -- she's young and unworldly, he's young and self-centered. And it's about them being the making of each other -- she learns to be smarter about people . . . ish? And he learns, uh, not to gamble irresponsibly or something. Except he learns this because it's so important for him to be responsible so he can take care of her, you know the little woman, she needs so much looking after, and the romance mostly consists of her slavish devotion to him, and it's just. The whole thing. So fucking uncomfortable.




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Comments

[lightreads]

Wow, yeah, that would have put me right off Heyer, too.

Interesting about partnerships -- that does make a sort of sense. And i like that kind of thing too, though in a professional/competence setting. I guess I just never glossed arranged/convenient marriages that way.

One of the most interesting conversations I ever had about it was with an Iranian friend. Her parents had an arranged marriage, and the expectation growing up was that they would arrange hers as well. For context, she is a college-educated engineer who works for Google and identifies largely as a Canadian. And I found it so fundamentally shocking when she said she might be willing to go along with it. Until she explained her reasoning to me. That being that her parents knew a lot about her, and about being grown ups, and about weathering hard times as a couple, and she actually thought they would make a very wise choice for her. She ultimately never went through with it, and is now a tragic old maid at the desperate age of 28 -- how shocking! -- but it was one of those 'huh...yeah, okay, that does explain the framework that makes this work' moments for me.

She would not be a shrinking miss though, thank you very much.

[cahn]

Yeah-- I come from a family where my parents don't, in fact, know much about what makes me tick -- and still, your comment there makes me remember that my first two tries at serious relationships that got this close to marriage (to the point where I feel it was pretty much luck that I didn't end up married to either of those guys) were complete wrecks, and my parents would have done a lot better than I did either of those times. Your Iranian friend actually sounds much wiser than I was, as an adolescent.