The Viscount and the Hoyden

When the Viscount Marchwood comes to spend Christmas with the Porchester family, eldest daughter Hally - Alice Halliston Porchester - is skeptical. The son of her dead mother's closest friend, he himself had never been to visit before, and Hally expects that he will consider himself too sophisticated for the country customs she and her younger siblings cherish. Soon won over by his warmhearted participation in all of the family's holiday traditions, the boisterous Hally concludes that he would make a suitable match for her cousin Mary Rose, who is as beautiful as she is gentle. The viscount, however, has other ideas...

Originally published in the fifth Regency Christmas collection from Signet, The Viscount and the Hoyden is a short show more holiday romance, one I might never have stumbled across, had it not been on offer as a free selection from the RegencyReads website I recently discovered. I'm glad I downloaded it (and that I discovered the site!), as it was an enjoyable piece of fluff. There isn't much to it - hardly surprising, given its length - but given my fondness for the sub-genre, it has convinced me to try a longer work by Laura Matthews at some point.

Note: I did have one quibble with the story, leading me to deduct half a star from my original three-star rating. The viscount mentions wanting to give Hally's younger brother Ralph an entertaining school story, to convince him that attending a boarding school will be fun. He mentions that it is "all about going away to school and the mischief they get up to there. The author describes cricket matches and hockey games and football matches." I suspect the author was thinking of Tom Brown's Schooldays, perhaps unaware that it was published in 1857, well after the Regency period (1811-1820). Or, she might not have had a specific title in mind, but assumed that there would have been earlier boys' school stories of that nature. Having studied the early history of the boys' school story, however, I can't think of a title that would have been available at the time, that matches her description. There are actually very few pre-Victorian boys' school stories. For most readers, this would not be a problem, but as someone who has researched the history of this genre, it irritated me enough that it was a distraction. show less