again the magic and again and again

an argument for a Stony Cross Park trilogy

me, keeping track of all the upstairs rooms in Stony Cross Park

Lisa Kleypas is my Heidi Montag 

Lisa Kleypas is probably the closest thing I have to a parasocial frenemy among romance novel authors. The scene from Mean Girls when Cady feels people around her getting bored because she cannot stop talking about Regina, but it is me and making TikToks about Kleypas books. She makes me angry and I love her books and I just want to chat about all the things I wish she had differently. I think there are more interesting authors, who write books that are more in line with my romance novel politics, who teach me to demand more from romance novels, and who, frankly, just write better books. I sometimes resent the space that Kleypas takes up in Historical Romance--where she has this outsized support from a publishing house like Avon, whereas so many of my favorite authors, including those who have written those more interesting HRs have stopped writing in the genre all together, for hinted-at reasons involving lack of editorial support or pressures for creating a certain type of mass product. I also possibly resent how much she shapes the vision of what a 21st century Historical Romance can and should look like. 

On the other hand, I love reading her books. Or more accurately I love reading the ones that I love. I think Kleypas and I may be in disagreement about what makes a Kleypas novel great because I often find myself singing the praises of something that she does that she then never totally explores to my satisfaction, or she’ll leave the threads I was most enthralled by loose and untidy. 

I know that I am able to take a machete to Kleypas’ project and rearrange and reprioritize the art she has given me because of that extreme institutional backing she finds at Avon. Kleypas has been writing books since the late 80s and she produces an extremely consistent product, especially in the last twenty years. Kleypas heroes may come in different flavors (the rake, the industrialist, the family man, the mysterious outsider), but they are united by sexual prowess, absolute obsessive devotion to the women they love, and incredibly broad shoulders. This consistency aligns with my favorite mode of consumption and criticism of romance novels--reading a body of work by one author and thinking about their philosophy of romance. What are the pieces that make a Kleypas romance novel? She has given me so much to work with in regards to this question! 

At the center of many of Kleypas’ series is a theory of home and land. Her characters express anxiety about either maintaining land or not having it to begin with, and what that means for their legacies. Two of her series start with a family home changing hands and the family unit having to deal with a highly pressurized transition. The heroes who are unattached to houses feel untethered, or even at times, close to villainy. A man without a home is suspect until he proves that he is very interested in establishing a home. A classic Kleypas hero trajectory is transforming from a rake/wastrel/hellion into a Good Man by investing in home and land. Within one of Kleypas’ most popular series, there is a trilogy that focuses on a home and four couples’ relationship to that home. If the three books from the Wallflowers series that deal directly with the Marsdens and Bowmans are extracted, then we get the Stony Cross Park trilogy. 

Kleypas might be an odd starting point for this newsletter, that I want to focus on the theories of justice and grace in romance novels--I think Kleypas has a decidedly backward looking, conservative worldview (how many of her best heroes are gleeful landlords!). But despite the snags between Kleypas’ viewpoint and my own, I think restoration is a theme of her books. When things are good and right for Kleypas characters, they are in the correct home and it often involves a rejection of or a return to a first home. I think even her most easily to mock quirk (the scale of her books that end with a last minute kidnapping that then gets resolved in under 30 pages) speaks to fixation on house and home as the venue of a happily ever after. 

she’s not riffing on Austen, she’s riffing on Brontë

Stony Cross Park is the home that Kleypas returns to most frequently--it appears in the Bow Street Runners, the Wallflowers, the Hathaways and the Ravenels, in differing degrees of involvement. It is the seat of the Earl of Westcliff and everyone who visits the Hampshire estate seems moved by its placid beauty, especially as contrasted to the London season that tends to be removed from and othered in Kleypas’ country set books. 

In the hidden trilogy of Again the Magic, It Happened One Autumn, and Scandal in Spring, Stony Cross Park functions as serene Wuthering Heights. The settings are vastly different in temperament--Wuthering Heights is set on the northern England Yorkshire moors and captures the tempestuous and Gothic nature of Emily Brontë’s characters and plot. Kleypas sets her books in the Hampshire of Jane Austen--tepid and sunny, blithely beautiful and easy to love. In Wuthering Heights, the house and the land are violated by the anguish caused by the people who go together not aligning and instead acting out and hurting each other. The house acts as much as an active, haunting force as any of the characters and it rips the family tree apart for one generation so that it can be put back together rightly, correcting the errors begat by judgment and fear and propriety, in the next one. 

Stony Cross Park does not have the same overtones of torment built into its setting, but the home’s function is similar to Wuthering Heights across the trilogy, where one generation must grapple and reject the trauma of the home, so that the next can correct it. And the paradisal setting creates anxiety in characters who worry about the bucolic setting exposing their own rough edges (“Something about the place makes me maudlin. Too damned picturesque”--Gideon Shaw, Again the Magic). 

Again the Magic is about a set of sisters who must abandon the home and its hauntings, while Autumn and Spring are both about outsider sisters embracing the magic imbued in the home and its lands to accept a new world where they can fully come into their own. And Stony Cross Park is indeed magical. While I would not remotely characterize Kleypas as a paranormal romance novelist, occasionally, it seems important to her to have some ambiguity about the reality of some element of mysticism, particularly in these three books.¹

The parallels to Wuthering Heights, the home, are not totally shoehorned here. Kleypas invites comparisons to the Brontë novel by starting off the trilogy with a love story that very clearly takes notes from Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff’s more tragic affair. Lady Aline Marsden and McKenna’s love story in Again the Magic begins much like Cathy and Heathcliff’s--McKenna is brought into an upper class home as an orphan and slips between different stations, primarily due to his burgeoning abilities, but also due to the lack of attention paid to the children of the home by the parents. Like Cathy and Heathcliff with their Nelly Dean, Aline and McKenna share a motherly connection with the housekeeper, Mrs. Faircloth, who acts as an emotional intermediary, both when the couple is trying to develop their affections and when they are trying to injure each other. McKenna’s mononym is enough to convince me that Kleypas is directly referring to Wuthering Heights here. 

And like Catherine and Heathcliff, the breaking of the young couple is the denouement of the trauma enacted on a family by an unfeeling set of parents on children that must be restored by first a rejection and then a restoration of the home. Wuthering Heights spans two generations, with twisting and intricate parallels. The Marsden-Bowmans are not quite two distinct generations, but Aline and Livia Marsden and Lillian and Daisy Bowman make for easy past and future divisions. It would be easy enough to think that the Marsden and Bowman sisters provide a one-to-one parallel with each other--Aline is Lillian and Livia is Daisy. Aline and Lillian are both the controlling, protective eldest sisters and out of any combination of two, Livia and Daisy share the most overlap in personality, with their otherworldly, fairy tale-ness and interest in whimsy and joy that is tamped down by parental indifference. But that parallelogram immediately becomes more complicated when considering the connections across Again the Magic, It Happened One Autumn and Scandal in Spring. I think a more useful way of thinking about the sisters is Aline and Livia as the collective questions and Lillian and Daisy as the collective answers for Stony Cross Park. The Marsden sisters grew up at the Park and need to suck out the poison that stems from the site of their traumas, whereas for Lillian and Daisy Bowman, the Park is a place of freedom and transition out of their own familial wounds. Marcus Westcliff, and by extension the seat of his earldom, is the fulcrum that links these two sets of sisters together. 

The individual connections across the sisters make me a little bit like Charlie explaining Pepe Silvia. And while I don’t think you can spoil the ending of a romance novel exactly (it’s happily ever after, duh), the more attempts I make explicating all the threads I see happening between these three books, the more it feels like spoilers. But I think the theme of a whirlpool of logic, repeating stories in the same geography, resonates here. Again the Magic of Stony Cross Park and again and again. So I’m limiting myself to a few sets of parallels. Livia Marsden really gets the short end of my rhetorical stick here in favor of Aline, but if I wrote about all of Livia’s parallels with Lillian and Daisy Bowman, this essay would be ten thousand words long. 

But hopefully by the end, you’ll be convinced that Kleypas can be shuffled and reorganized to your heart’s content. Push back against what she delivers to us--what else would be the point of her writing the same book for forty years?--and consider the function emotional geography has for her theory of romance. 

pierce the room, like a cannonball

The first time I suspected that there was more to the connections between these characters, beyond just being a part of the same extended family within the Wallflowers universe was when I reread Scandal in Spring after having read Again the Magic and realized how often Daisy is placed in the same spots at Aline Marsden at Stony Cross Park, particularly in ways that fulfill unresolved moments for Aline. So that’s where I am starting with explaining the parallels between these books--tracing some of the rooms of Stony Cross Park across the trilogy, though this is by no means all of the spaces that appear and reappear in different contexts. 

Aline Marsden’s room is the first setting that appears in the trilogy. McKenna sneaks in through a window to confront her about standing him up for a platonic day by the river. She has acted out because she has seen him kissing another girl and this is the first moment in their lives when both characters must consider that they feel more for each other than brotherly affection. Her room is also the setting when she sends him away from Stony Cross Park, lying to him, letting him believe that she was just using him for sexual favors.

But the most distinctive feature of Aline Marsden’s room does not appear until after McKenna leaves the Park. Within her room, there is a small annex called a cabinet. The cabinet is a quirk of Aline’s room in Stony Cross Park--an antechamber that originally came from a French chateau. The old Earl and Countess bought it, part and parcel, and moved all the elements into Stony Cross Park. The purpose of the room is “upper class…daydreaming, studying and writing, and conversing intimately with a friend.” The room is Aline’s little sanctuary and we first enter it in the moments after she has sent McKenna away from the house. On the window, she keeps a little collection of items “a tiny painted-metal horse…a pair of tin soldiers, one of them missing an arm…a cheap wooden button from a man’s shirt…a small folding knife with a handle carved from a stag’s horn.” All these items are pilfered from McKenna over their time together. Aline retreats into the room after she has caused great pain to McKenna and herself at the behest of her father.

After McKenna leaves Stony Cross Park, Aline is caught in a fire, which severely burns her legs, to the point where she almost dies. When he returns to the house years later and finds her unmarried, he is surprised, but she does not want to tell him that she has never married because of her disability, so she allows him to think that she refused any companionship out of an inflated sense of self and class. Since she framed her rejection of him as related to their differences in class, McKenna is willing to believe that she is still the uppity woman who sent him away and he plans to seduce her as revenge. Aline refusing to tell him about her scars is the great conflict between the two and even as McKenna enters more spaces in Stony Cross Park, that he never transverses while he is a servant, Aline keeps him at a distance from her body. 

The second scene for Aline in the cabinet is the second time she and McKenna sleep together. Aline wants to talk to McKenna about some machinations that her brother is doing in regards to their business dealings and invites him to the family parlor. McKenna insists (in very Kleypas domineering fashion) that they instead go to her room, and then the antechamber. He has never been in the cabinet before when they were children, despite his frequent scaling of the wall to enter her bedroom, a reflection of their honoring of some proprietary barriers when they were still under the thumb of the old Earl. In the cabinet, he sees her collection of items representing him and recognizes the little metal horse as his old favorite toy. Aline and McKenna sleep together in the antechamber and she insists on rapidity, so that she can hide as much of her body and scars from McKenna as possible. He correctly interprets her shame, but believes it stems from sleeping with him at all. 

The entire scene in the antechamber is told from Aline’s point of view, so it is unclear in the moment the motivation of McKenna--he has insisted that he is seducing Aline for revenge for her sending him away, but he seems totally unable to resist being tender toward her, even as he is interpreting her actions in the worst faith possible. As he leaves, he quotes back to her “no promise, no regrets--just as you wanted,” revealing that bitterness of the scene at least in part stems from him resentfully fulfilling her requests about the nature of the affair. And later when discussing the affair with Gideon Shaw, McKenna reports that he wants to take Aline back to New York with him, though he only envisions as possible through threats and manipulations because “she’s made it clear that anything other than a five-minute hump in the closet is out of the question.” McKenna totally misreads Aline’s acquiescence to bringing him into the cabinet.

The cabinet does not make another appearance in Again the Magic, leaving the space marked by the tragic and bitter meeting of the lovers. Aline and McKenna do not resolve their relationship until he leaves Hampshire and Stony Cross Park. She follows after him and pulls him off his boat to America. The couple finally confronts their problems not in a home, but in a borrowed hotel room. Stony Cross Park, for all its idyllic properties, cannot provide a space for this couple. Even in his first proposal to Aline at Stony Cross Park, McKenna recognizes that part of what makes the idea of marriage even available to them is Marcus Marsden potentially marrying, resulting in Aline having “no real place at Stony Cross Park,” relieved of her hostess duties. But he continues to frame it as “a sacrifice for [her] to leave [her] family and friends, and the place where [she’s] lived since [she was] born.” At the first proposal, McKenna still does not grasp that leaving Stony Cross Park is no sacrifice at all, rather that staying there is Aline’s version of self-flagellation, punishing herself for both not being brave when they were young and for not ever quite fitting the life her father wanted for her. 

Aline is finally brave enough to show McKenna her scars and admit her love when she throws off Stony Cross Park as a setting. The last we hear of Aline and McKenna in Again the Magic is a letter to Livia describing her thriving in the level of control she has in her own domesticity alongside McKenna in New York and the level of accomplishment Aline feels in the faster paced city that allows to be busier than the slow-moving Hampshire estate. The explicit rejection of Hampshire paradise as requisite for her happiness leaves hanging resolution of Stony Cross Park. The resolving comes in the form of the Bowman sisters. 

Livia Marsden, who has the secondary story in Again the Magic, similarly must leave Stony Cross Park to enact her love story. She falls in love with Gideon Shaw, an American business brought to estate by McKenna for their business dealings. She had a fiancé who passed away, but not before she became pregnant. She lost the baby and became a recluse on the estate, even more so than Aline. Shaw would be called a high-functioning alcoholic today, never appearing drunk in public, but drinking to the point of illness in the privacy of his rooms. Shaw and Livia are immediately drawn together, but he fears for her forming a relationship with him and removes himself to London after she discovers the extent of his alcoholism.

Supported by Aline, Livia travels to London, essentially on her own (she arranges a nearly blind chaperone from the village) and delivers herself to Shaw’s hotel room. Outside the confines of Stony Cross Park for the first time in two years since she lost the baby, Livia is able to demand interaction and affection and shirk anxieties about making herself vulnerable to gossip or hurt.

Livia and Gideon stay in England longer than Aline and McKenna, appearing both in the first Wallflowers book, Secrets of a Summer Night and in It Happened One Autumn. But it is clear they are temporarily staying—once Marcus marries, he no longer needs Livia to serve as hostess at Stony Cross Park. By the time we get to Scandal in Spring, Livia and Gideon have left for New York to be with Aline and McKenna. The Marsden sisters finally are able to abandon the site of their anguish.

To me, Again the Magic is Kleypas most self-contained book. Her format tends to involve setting up a couple for the sequel in the prior book. This method is not unique to Kleypas, but her product is so inconsistently charming to me, even as they are all written within her very narrow romance scheme, it makes it hard to make a full singular recommendation of any of her books. Marrying Winterbourne is one of my favorites, but what are Rhys and Helen without his illness or the gift of the orchid in Cold-Hearted Rake, a book I have some affection for, but that is comparatively so so boring? Devil’s Daughter features my all-time favorite romance novel hero, Cousin West Ravenel, but his journey from wastrel to land steward is meaningless unless you read the first four Ravenels books. My favorite moment from Win and Merripen (the couple from Seduce Me at Sunrise) is actually the window-cleaning scene in Mine til Midnight! 

Because Again the Magic is written like a prequel (the only time Kleypas has attempted this kind of structure, I believe), Aline and Livia both are given satisfactory Happily Ever Afters within the book. The thing that is not satisfactorily resolved are the questions of Stony Cross Park. We’re told over and over again that the Hampshire estate is beautiful and peaceful, but it's daughters have to leave it to get their happily ever afters. For Kleypas, it is not an option for the Park to actually have a hidden sinister underbelly. The second generation in Wuthering Heights are the ones who finally leave the home, moving to the antithesis that is Thrushcross Grange. That’s the resolution for Brontë, but Kleypas won’t abandon the home because its happily ever after has to be on the table too. 

restore the Earl, restore the house

Kleypas heroes are linked, irrevocably, with the land that they own and Marcus Marsden, the Earl of Westcliff, is no different. His sisters’ response to familial trauma maybe be to abandon the site of it. But Marcus is stuck with the ancestral home and must make due. He begins the process of correcting the geography of the home, first with his sisters and then with his wife and her sister.

The big beginning of the recovery of Stony Cross Park in this book is actually in the family sitting room. The Marsden parlor is another room that reappears frequently across the trilogy. Marcus’ scene with Aline where he asks to see her scars in the parlor is, in my mind, the real beginning of his revelation that takes him through choosing to marry Lillian in It Happened One Autumn and providing emotional support to Daisy in Scandal in Spring. The scenes that happen in the parlor represent a rejection of the code of behavior and treatment of his family that his father modeled. Aline’s father insists she break with McKenna after summoning her to his study--a room that Marcus now occupies, and at times in Again the Magic, one that he summons his sisters to. But when Marcus needs to argue to Aline that she ought to go to McKenna, he does not beckon her. Nor does he violate her space by confronting her in her room. He meets her in the family parlor and they discuss something directly that they avoided for twelve years--the exact nature and extent of her scarring. Marcus’ equitable approach to Aline is what gives her the spark to go find McKenna before he gets on the boat, and bravery to finally tell him about her disability. 

Again the Magic focuses on the Marsden sisters, but Marcus is the romantic lead in It Happened One Autumn. In the prequel, his purpose is to practice being kind to his sisters in ways their parents never were. The siblings were not close while growing up, but the traumas of his sisters kept them at home long after their father passed away, leading to the siblings having an awkward camaraderie, based entirely on friendships they formed as adults, rather than any nostalgia for their relationships as children. But until Marcus meets Lillian Bowman, he assumes that he is reforming the Earldom for the benefit of his sisters. While his sisters married Americans for love, Marcus plans on marrying an English woman for duty, fulfilling the directives given down by his parents. But as the Earl, he is the one who has to live at Stony Cross Park--in order for the home to be restored, he has got to confront even more directly the wound that exists within his family, otherwise the manor house will not be solved. The venues of Marcus’ restoration are the study and Marsden parlor and how he deploys them as settings for his earl-tasks. 

Marcus does not shut up the study of his father, though his sisters remain uncomfortable in the room so closely associated with the old earl. He is frequently in there with his male friends, holding court and talking business. But Kleypas does have Marcus shift how he uses the room with his sisters and the Bowmans, opening up the spaces where Marcus has his instructive, earl-ish conversations with them to include the library and the family parlor. 

Two conversations, each with a Bowman, and where they take place, show the change in how Marcus views his domain of Stony Cross Park: the apology from Lillian in the library in It Happened One Autumn and the assurance he gives Daisy in the Marsden parlor in Scandal in Spring. This is what I mean by Bowman sisters answering the questions raised by the Marsdens--what is hinted at to the side of the Marsden sisters stories in Again the Magic is made clear by the Bowman sisters stories.

In It Happened One Autumn, Lillian insists on performing a dangerous jump on a horse --one that she is ill-prepared to do on a side saddle, a rig that she is less comfortable with compared to riding astride. After Marcus forbids her, in front of a crowd, from performing the jump, she rides off in a fury and does what he has explicitly told her not to do. She does not injure herself, but very easily could have. He then yells at her in front of the house party, to her great embarrassment, mostly out of fear for her safety and also clearly out of need to prove himself master of his own home and she snaps back. The old Earl is not recalled directly in that moment, but the fiery anger and commanding nature that makes a Westcliff a Westcliff is present. 

But Marcus chooses to do something different than the model we see in Again the Magic from the old Earl. He allows the Bowmans, the entire family, to visit him in the sprawling library,² rather than his austere private study that is so closely linked with the old Earl’s dressing downs. And when Mr. Bowman insists that Lillian apologize for her recklessness, Marcus rejects her apology in favor of providing his own, for his high-handedness and arrogance that goaded her into action. The Earl’s study does not recede into the background, in favor of another room, but instead Marcus shifts how it is used, while remaining himself. Lillian does confront Marcus in his study when she believes he has arranged a betrothal contract with her father without her consent or advice. But again, Marcus reveals that he is working outside the totally manipulative model of his father (he asked for permission to court Lillian, not arrangements for their betrothal). The study becomes a setting for Marcus offering compromise and discussions, not directives and set downs. 

The other space that Marcus opens up to use is the Marsden family parlor, which is where he discusses Aline’s scarring frankly with her in Again the Magic. But this is also the setting of the blissful domesticity of Marcus and Lillian at the beginning of Scandal in Spring. Lillian is pregnant and angry that Mr. Bowman wants Daisy to marry Matthew Swift. She is sitting with her husband in the parlor as Daisy explains the ultimatum her father has given her. Lillian being in the Marsden parlor³ for this conversation, now that both Aline and Livia have gone to America with their husbands, shows the transformation of the Marsdens of the house--Lillian is a Marsden of Stony Cross Park and this is now her family parlor. Marcus is treated by Daisy like the patriarch of her family, even though she is discussing a directive from her own father at this moment. But she is not chided or chagrined, she is looking for support--an unfathomable possibility for the old Earl and his family. 

After the discussion of the ultimatum, Lillian falls asleep and in what is possibly my favorite scene in all of Kleypas, Daisy reveals one more thing that her father said to her to Marcus, too fearful of the ire that it could cause in pregnant Lillian. I’ll reproduce it in full here, but this is the final transformation of Marcus Marsden, Earl of Westcliff, where he makes it clear that he has rejected the model of his father in favor of taking seriously his duties to the emotional well-being of his wife and sisters. 

“My father…” Daisy began, then bit her lip… “He called me a parasite,” she said, keeping her voice soft to avoid disturbing Lillian. “He asked me to tell him how the world has benefitted from my existence, or what I had ever done for anyone.”

“And your reply?” Westcliff asked. 

“I…couldn’t think of anything to say.” 

Westcliff’s coffee-colored eyes were unfathomable. He made a gesture for her to approach the settee, and she obeyed. To her astonishment, he took her hand in his and gripped it warmly. The usually circumspect earl had never done such a thing before. 

“Daisy,” Westcliff said gently, “most lives are not distinguished by great achievements. They are measured by an infinite number of small ones. Each time you do a kindness for someone or bring a smile to his face, it gives your life meaning. Never doubt your value, little friend. The world would be a dismal place without Daisy Bowman in it.” 

I cry every time I read this scene. Marcus, the taciturn, manipulative, businessman, provides the scene with the sweetest emotional tenor in all of the Wallflowers series. Daisy initially hesitates to tell Marcus about her father’s comments because they are business partners. But this is his final rejection of the mode of connection his father insisted on--one where Marcus never was allowed to grow too close to anyone out of fear of growing soft in his role as Earl. His revelation is completed by his emotional support of Daisy--silly, whimsical, flighty Daisy Bowman. 

once more with feeling

I’m biased in favor of Daisy Bowman. This whole essay could be an exercise in justifying my not-so-secret extreme preference to Scandal in Spring over any of the other Wallflowers books, especially Devil in Winter, which is the most popular Wallflowers books and the most beloved by Kleypas, if her returning to the characters in it is any indication of her preference. But in this trilogy, if Lillian Bowman’s romance with Marcus solves the Earl, Daisy Bowman is who solves the house. Both have to happen for Kleypas, who is so invested in the union of man and home. 

Daisy Bowman is the Wallflower who is the most enamored with the vague magic with which Kleypas imbues Stony Cross Park. In the first book in the proper quartet, she is the Wallflowers who insists on casting pins into a wishing well and is the one who takes the process most seriously as the reason her friends are able to marry for love. The well comes back again and again in books set at Stony Cross Park, most notably in Scandal in Spring. Daisy wishes for the “right man,” and lo and behold, Matthew Swift walks up to her. Matthew is her father’s business protégé and Daisy has always considered him too self-serious and drab. But when she explains to him what she is doing, expecting a rebuke, he insists on participating and makes a wish himself. 

In the context of Daisy solving the hanging problems of setting for Stony Cross Park, the wishing well is the intended destination when Aline Marsden and McKenna first sneak away from the Park after his return to be alone together for the first time. But as they are walking, he breaks the silence by asking of Aline still visits the wishing well, and she replies no, that the magic of the well had run out for her long ago, because she was always wishing for the wrong things, with the implication that she was wishing for McKenna. While walking, Aline struggles to keep pace with McKenna, given the injuries to her legs, that at the time he still doesn’t know about. This leads them to stop before their destination and their conversation during their stop leads to their first sexual encounter, in which McKenna discovers to his surprise that Aline has never taken other lovers during his time away from Stony Cross Park. 

The couple never makes it to the wishing well and parts bitterly. The difference in the couples interactions with the wishing well is a model of so much of Daisy’s interactions with the house and its land--a space that is oppressive to or fails Aline or Livia is open and receptive to Daisy. 

Daisy stays in Aline’s room when she is visiting Stony Cross and thinks of the antechamber that was the site of some of Aline’s most bitter moments as charming and quaint. She also romanticizes the stories she has heard about McKenna sneaking into Aline’s bedroom through the window. One of Daisy’s most cited character traits is a fascination with Gothic romances, so it makes sense that she attaches to the clips of stories she hears about Aline and McKenna’s Wuthering Heights inspired romances. But when she relates the story of McKenna climbing the trellis to be with Aline, Matthew points out that breaking your neck is decidedly not romantic? The preceding parallel romance necessitated incomplete treks to wish fulfillment destinations that don’t work anymore and outside the bounds of Stony Cross Park’s doors. But Matthew and Daisy can throw pins into the well and use the stairs. 

The Marsden children are afraid of becoming like their father and Daisy’s father is too ignorant to realize just how much she does have his best qualities, like a sense of honor when it comes to contracts and a precision for language and facts. But the Marsden sisters never get to repair their relationship with their father, one of Mr. Bowman’s last scenes in Scandal in Spring is him defending his daughter’s right to speak up. The act of marrying Matthew Swift, her father’s protege, is in and of itself an act of restoration in the world of Kleypas--Daisy gets to be with someone who has the pragmatism and consistency of her father, who also appreciates her whimsy and joie de vivre and has no interest in tamping it down. The same thing that makes Daisy believe so fervently in the magic of Stony Cross Park are the things that Matthew loves the most about her. Daisy Bowman is not the heroine who is going to spend the rest of her life at Stony Cross Park, but she is the one sets it right.

to end, a wee bit of meta cognition

I’ve read these three books probably a collective four times over the past week, as I was poring over them, looking for the answers to the emotional geography of this family. Even as I am sitting here, having written close to six thousand words about the topic, I keep thinking of other little moments that would further map out what I see as an incredibly neat internal trilogy within this series that focuses on this house. 

Choosing to start this newsletter with a long essay on Kleypas, who I really don’t think needs support for me and who I wish took up less space in how we talk about histrom, is maybe counterintuitive. But I knew from the moment that I decided to try and write out longer essay forms on a platform disconnected from Goodreads, that I would start with Kleypas. For better or worse, she’s my baseline. And I think demonstrating her interest in restoration, as manifest in how Stony Cross Park is used in these three books, shows that there’s something to the inherent union of theories of justice and romance. That even for Kleypas, for a satisfactory happily ever after, something has to be broken and we have to find a way to fix it that honors those who have been harmed, but that those fixes will necessarily vary based on the extent and context of the harms. Happily ever afters cannot be achieved at Stony Cross Park for Livia and Aline, but cannot be achieved without the Park for Lillian and Daisy. And it makes sense that for an author who is so enamored with landlords that the manor house needs to be happy too. 

1. Aline and McKenna go to the fair in Again the Magic and have their futures read by a fortune teller and Aline’s recovery from her injuries seems to be based on a healer outside of traditional medicine. Lillian attracts Marcus with a perfume that may or may not have magical aphrodisiac qualities. And out of all of the Wallflowers, Daisy Bowman most fervently believes in the magic of the wishing well that frequently appears in books set at Stony Cross Park.

2. Kleypas refers to the room in this scene as both the “library” and the “study,” but based on descriptions of both rooms throughout the books, I determined that they are two different rooms and the one she means here is the library as distinct from the Earl’s study. 

3. In what is another possible Kleypas error or conflation, this scene seems to be happening in London, possibly at Marsden Terrace, the London home that we don’t see directly in any of the books, though it is referenced multiple times. But Kleyaps refers to the room as the “Marsden parlor” which is the phrase she uses for the family sitting room at Stony Cross Park. I’m happy to allow the conflation/confusion because it serves my purposes of the parlor (whether it is at Stony Cross Park or Marsden Terrace) serving as a resolution for Marcus.