Sylvester or the Wicked Uncle

 

By Georgette Heyer

A Regency Romance

Phoebe Marlow's mother died when she was quite young. Her father remarried and he and his new wife had several more children. Phoebe did not enjoy a close or loving relationship with her stepmother, who was an overbearing and stern parent to Phoebe. After years of bullying by her stepmother, Phoebe lived in fear of displeasing her in any way and yearned to escape from the woman's oppressive control. 

Phoebe had the required coming out for a girl of her social standing in London, but it hadn't been successful. She was too thin, too shy, too awkward to gain any admirers. But she did have a keen eye and her observations of society ended up in a thinly-disguised novel about a cruel man trying to deprive his infant nephew of the nephew's rightful inheritance. And once her novel was published, it was an instant success, as members of the upper class recognized their fellows in the caricatures in the pages of the novel.

The villain of the piece was based on Sylvester, the Duke of Salford, whom Phoebe had meet a couple times at parties when in London. He did not make a favorable impression on her, as she judged him to be cold and arrogant. And he had a very recognizable face because of his rather unusual eyebrows, which, of course, she included in her novel. 

In the novel, the heroine struggles to save her child from his uncle's evil machinations. What Phoebe didn't know when she based her villain on Sylvester was that he was also the guardian of a young boy and that Sylvester was at odds with the boy's mother because she was trying to remove her child from Sylvester's guardianship. 

In Phoebe's novel, the mother frees her son from the wicked uncle's captivity and they flee together to freedom. So the mother of Sylvester's nephew, upon reading the book and seeing the wicked uncle based (loosely) on her brother-in-law Sylvester, views it as a roadmap to freeing her child from his guardianship. So she kidnaps her son and takes him to France.

Phoebe, the anonymous author of the novel that has high society talking and wondering who wrote the book, has meanwhile come to know Sylvester and realized that her caricature of him was cruel and unjust and has caused him considerable embarrassment. They have a huge fight in public and Phoebe's reputation is ruined. So her grandmother decides to take her and travel to France to give society time to get over the scandal. But while waiting to board a ship, Phoebe encounters Sylvester's sister-in-law with her young son, Sylvester's ward, preparing to flee to France. By now, Phoebe knows that Sylvester is not the monster portrayed in her novel, but a caring and loving uncle to his young ward. And she also has come to understand that the boy's mother is selfish, shallow and irresponsible and that Sylvester is actually the better guardian for the boy. Phoebe, on board the ship, tries to reason with the mother, but ends up being taken to France when the woman's husband sneakily orders the ship to set sail.

This was a good story, spoiled by its heroine, who is probably one of the weakest and most feebleminded heroines that Heyer ever created in her romance novels. Oh, Phoebe is supposed to capture her hero's heart, but how he could ever fall for such a weakling is rather hard to understand. We are supposed to admire Phoebe, but instead we end up just wishing she would show a little gumption and stand up to her overbearing stepmother instead of trembling in fear at the mere thought of that woman's bad temper. And once Phoebe is part of London society, she shows the same lack of spine when her authorship of the notorious novel becomes widely known. Instead she agrees to run away to France and hide from the criticism and curiosity. And yet Sylvester decides this is the woman for him? Hard to believe.

Here is a review by Laurel Ann Nattress on Austenprose.