Book completed

The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies, by Alison Goodman. First in a planned series. Fairly light reading with some very heavy material. It's basically a Regency romance, with two big exceptions - instead of being in her 20s, our narrator (and her fraternal twin sister) are 42, and our narrator is in serious rebellion against the norms of her time for the treatment of women (and people of color). She finds herself establishing a practice of rescuing women who need rescuing, and in the process, the reader learns about the shocking (to us) ways that women were treated in 1812 England.

She and her sister get started by retrieving letters from a blackmailer for a friend, then the friend asks them to take on something much more momentous - the rescue of a woman from the husband who has her imprisoned in their home with the intention of killing her so he can marry someone else whom he hoped would be more fertile. There's nothing illegal about imprisoning one's wife or, apparently, doping her up with opiates, right up to the point of murdering her. (Divorce is very difficult, requiring an act of Parliament, and divorced people aren't allowed to remarry.) After this adventure, the book covers two more, as more people need to be rescued from other circumstances. (The conditions in the third case were particularly horrific, so don't read this if you're faint of heart.) We also learn that the novelist Fanny Burney endured a mastectomy without anaesthesia (ACK) and survived another 30 years.

If you're interested in a Regency romance with a modern social conscience, and you don't mind being shocked by how awfully people can treat each other, then I recommend it. It's not great literature, but I enjoyed the characters.

Not feeling great

Today I woke congested, with something of a cough and sore throat and generally feeling unwell. I had two Zoom meetings for the youth orchestras, one where I sat upright and participated, and the other where I lay in my bed with the camera off and listened. I also managed to watch an episode of Monk - only two more to go and then I'll finally have seen the entire series. Other than that, I've just been reading, light stuff that helps distract me from feeling unwell. Since tomorrow's J's birthday, I hope I'll bounce back quickly. He was congested on Monday and felt much better on Tuesday. On the other hand, I could have picked up something in the holiday market on Saturday - I should have worn a mask.