devil's details
Lisa Kleypas' best hero and worst impulse
The concept of a “book boyfriend” from a romance novel is pretty foreign to me. I remember having crushes on characters from books I read in elementary school and middle school.1 But this is not how I read romance novels. I don’t think this is inherently a more evolved way of reading romance, though I hate any discussion of romance that assumes this self-insertion as the default mode.
My one great big exception is Lisa Kleypas’ Cousin West Ravenel, hero of Devil’s Daughter.2 I’ve never written substantively about Devil’s Daughter or West Ravenel primarily because I don’t think the book is that interesting. But I’ve read it probably 20 times in four years. I love hanging out in West and Phoebe’s relationship, but as a novel, it falls apart for me in so many ways. I don’t like reading or writing romance criticism that forefronts personal preferences and tastes. So I’ve had no compulsion to write something where I gush over one of the only romance novel heroes that has lit up my “that’s my Boyfriend”3 receptors of my brain.
But after the Lorraine Heath debacle earlier this month, I wanted a comfort read and read this book twice in two days (five times in a week, if you count the times I’ve gone back over it after I decided to write this). As much as I love West’s arc through the Ravenels series, Kleypas makes choices in Devil’s Daughter that undercut the emotional through lines established in the first four books, instead prioritizing fan service connection to one of my least favorite of her heroes. This disconnect is central to my experience of the novel. I might be the only terminal case of Cousin West Ravenel sickness, and maybe the cure is telling you all about it. It’s so hot outside and I need to excise this stifling fixation by writing about it.
My introduction to West Ravenel was in early days of romance reading for me, and I immediately attached to him. His book is the fifth in Lisa Kleypas’ Ravenels series, and he also features prominently in the first four. So there’s lots of time to hang out with him before he’s the romantic hero and a lot of time for him to transform. West first appears in Cold-Hearted Rake as Devon Ravenel’s listless and dissolute younger brother. At the beginning of that book, Devon unexpectedly inherits the title Earl of Trenear, along with the family’s seat, Eversby Priory. The house is improperly entailed, meaning Devon has the option to sell all the properties, pay off the inherited debts, and live with a title and none of the encumbering lands.
For West, the decision is obvious: do that. Why wouldn’t a man who lived as a poor, unwanted relation to an aristocratic family do that? Good riddance with all the obligations, take the rewards, and continue a life of debauchery. The complicating factors for Devon are Kathleen, the previous Earl’s widow, and Helen, Pandora, and Cassandra, his three sisters, all living at the house. Of course, it helps that Devon has an immediate attraction to Kathleen. At this point, West has no interest in taking up a profession or responsibilities.
Devon and he had lived parallel lives up until this point, but West seems to be struggling more with the indulgences of a rakish lifestyle. He drinks too much and is embarrassed by his behavior, but has nothing to inspire work to give him a purpose. Now Devon has a duty to the estate and a title, so the gap between their intrinsic motivations only grows.
Consistently, readers are told West was once a rake, but the descriptions of him just make him sound like a class clown with just enough access to money and drink to be dangerous to himself. “I was an absolute swine. Brawling at parties. Pissing in fountains and vomiting in potted plants. I’ve slept with other men’s wives, I’ve ruined marriages…There will always be rumors and ugly gossip, and I can’t contradict most of it because I was always too drunk to know whether it happened or not,” he confesses to Phoebe, his lover in Devil’s Daughter. Contrast that description of raking with how West describes Devon in Cold-Hearted Rake, as he attempts to cool his brother’s passion for Kathleen: “Kathleen is a sensitive and compassionate woman who deserves to be loved…and if you have the capacity for that, I’ve never witnessed it. I’ve seen what happens to women who care about you. Nothing cools your lust faster than affection.” West sees Devon with clarity and himself with judgment.
For all West’s resentment of the implication of duty, Kleypas shows how easily he takes to affection. He’s the brother to take tea casually with the Ravenel sisters and shower them with gifts. He’s silly and interested in their lives. Without any effort at all, he becomes their favorite relative. West’s humor and warmth are a sharp contrast to the girls’ late parents, who cared primarily about their older brother, and their older brother who was an unrepentant bully. While Devon is motivated to invest in the house and land through duty, West is motivated by his family, first his obligation to his brother’s goals, and then his new familial connection with the women.
Though the younger girls adore West immediately, widow Kathleen notices the signs of his alcohol abuse and worries about his temper and self-reported sexual appetite, all family traits that made her short marriage to Theo Ravenel miserable. When West attempts to ride while drunk, the circumstances that led to Theo’s death, Kathleen gives him a dressing down for not seeing the effort Devon is putting into saving the estate and the local economy that is dependent on the house and its lands. She bitterly tells him, “Perhaps someday you’ll find someone who can save you from your excesses. Personally, I don’t believe you’re worth the effort.”
After this come-to-Jesus moment, West settles into the activities of the Hampshire home and throws himself into farming and estate management, which he handles as Devon’s proxy. When Devon returns to the Priory, he is surprised both by West’s improved health and the familial love on display between the Ravenel sisters and his brother. West has worked hard to make Devon proud, but also to earn back the trust of Kathleen. Devon, a true Rake, assumes that West is attempting to seduce one or more of the women, perhaps even Kathleen.
But Kleypas’ ability to write sibling relationships, especially across genders, has always been a strength of hers. And it’s always clear in West’s prequel arc that he has no real romantic connection with any of the eligible women in his circle. A frustration I have with the stock character of a “reformed rake” is when the romantic partner inspires the reformation at the beginning of the romantic pairing. Anthony Bridgerton, now devoted paramour, until recently was nobly sleeping with opera singers, but has since been inspired to turn over a new leaf. But West’s redemption is exclusively motivated by familial connection, not romantic.
First in Cold-Hearted Rake, and then in subsequent books, particularly Marrying Winterborne and Hello, Stranger, West exists as a fulcrum between the couples, a platonic sounding board for the women when he acts as their surrogate brother and clear-headed peer for the men. In this fulcrum role, he is also the secondary character most likely to get point-of-view scenes, as he assesses the main couple with his typically astute observations about how they might fix their conflict.
In this role, West is exceedingly self-deprecating, assuring everyone that the marriages he subtly encourages and love matches he endorses are simply not for him. During one conversation while Devon is attempting to convince West that all men have pasts and that shouldn’t stop him from pursuing a romantic relationship with Phoebe, he asks, “What’s stopping you? The fact that you used to be a rake?” and West responds, “You were a rake, I was a wreck.” The great burden of his past is embarrassing and uncouth behavior, more than disreputable sexual indulgence. The references to West’s sexual appetites never include allusions to broken hearts or the ruination of young women. At least sexually, he is a social model rake, where his behavior becomes less morally culpable, removed from the Victorian context. Sleeping with married women is perhaps not a moral good, but has a long history in the genre of being the less culpable behavior for rakes compared to seducing innocents and breaking their hearts.
The family all thinks, “Why couldn’t the best man they know fall in love and marry some highborn lady?” West continually insists that he couldn’t settle for a life of monogamy, but he’s essentially celibate throughout the whole series, distracted by his work on the farm. His POV chapters in the first four books and then in his own book slowly paint the picture that his reticence to marry is less about the need to indulge in sexual pleasures forever and more about a deep shame about his past behavior of buffoonery and an anxiety that he could slip again and hurt those he cares about.
One of Kleypas’ most frustrating structural habits to me, a reader who revisits her books as comfort reads repeatedly, is her tendency to nest prequel information that is paramount to the story of a couple in an earlier book. She doesn’t do this all the time (in Elizabeth Hoyt books, sometimes it feels like half the story of any given book is setting up the next story), but it can make for an unsatisfactory revisit when she offloads emotionally load-bearing scenes to earlier books. Two egregious examples are Married by Morning and Marrying Winterborne, where the meetings and tense flirtations that explain the stakes of the conflict of the main couple happen in the books immediately prior. The pacing gets thrown off, especially on reread, when a reader might pick up just their favorite couple’s book. But I will tolerate this habit when the individual books represent the culmination of the work done in the prequels.
For West, you have to read the first four Ravenel books to understand his self-loathing and transformation that has already happened at the beginning of Devil’s Daughter. The disconnect between the dismissal of his behavior as rakish and the deep well of pain and self-doubt that he feels, combined with the consistent charm and love he expresses toward his family, has to happen with him in the background, romantically, as he watches his family fall in love. The payoff should be when that disconnect has the opportunity to be resolved in his book as the lead.
And in the opening of Devil’s Daughter, West’s anxiety about his past has come true. Phoebe, Lady Clare has never met him, but she hates him for his past behavior. While her late, chronically ill husband was at boarding school, West was a cruel bully, making fun of Henry’s special diet, his physical weakness, and his sensitive spirit. Phoebe and West are thrown together at a family wedding, and their connection is encouraged by their respective families, but Phoebe is determined to hate him, despite an immediate attraction.
West does not know that Phoebe was Henry’s childhood sweetheart, but is all too ready to accept her suspicion and distrust of him without knowing any underlying reason. He senses her dislike of him and attributes it to his lowly character, believing Phoebe is accurately reading the truth of the distance between them. (“Phoebe, Lady Clare wasn’t meant for him. He was a former wastrel with no property, no title, and no wealth. She was a highborn widow with two young sons. She needed a proper, well-heeled husband, not a scandalous affair.”) But during the wedding week, Phoebe sees all the Ravenels relying on West’s steadiness, and as a recent widow, just coming back into society, no one is more prepared to adapt to her social anxiety than easygoing West, who follows her conversational needs with charm. In spite of herself, Phoebe begins to forgive West.
West’s goofiness is also a welcome balm to her small family, including her two sons. Their lives were shaped by her last husband’s wasting disease and West brings a renewed vivacity to them. Phoebe is the daughter of Evie Jenner and Sebastian, Viscount St. Vincent, a couple known to many Kleypas readers from Devil in Winter. When her inherited personality is hinted at, the implication is that this woman has caged herself in, out of affection for her sensitive and exacting husband, and perhaps a cannonball of a man like West can break her out.
When West realizes his past connection with Henry Clare, it’s his worst nightmare come true. Finally, he meets a woman whom he can see loving, even from a distance, as his new industrious self, and she already hates him for his past. A reminder of this bad act, coupled with his identity forged during his formative years, confirms to West that he has always been bad and will never be good. West wants to correct one of his worst treatments of Henry by returning a beloved adventure book that he had stolen to Phoebe. Phoebe attempts to offer unconditional forgiveness, since she has already seen how much work West has done to be a good man, the results of the work witnessed by readers of the prequels. But West doesn’t want off the hook, explaining his mean motivations for taking the book.
Devastatingly, West points out that his favorite thing from childhood, the storybook, was obtained through a cruel act, a signal of his anxiety about not deserving anything good in life. Arguing over who should now possess the book leads to the couple’s first kiss and Phoebe’s whispered declaration “there’s nothing wicked about you except your kisses.” The arc of their relationships extends with predictable tension between two truths: West insists that he is a villain, and Phoebe sees him as a hero tailor-made for her situation: a widow with two growing sons and a large estate that she has been kept in the dark with regards to the particulars by her late husband’s family. Who better to marry than a competent estate agent with an active imagination for the world of make-believe who can throw a toddler up on his shoulders with ease? West just needs to learn to trust the love that Phoebe is offering him.
If needing the background of the first four Ravenels books was the only major frustration here, Devil’s Daughter would be a slightly frustrating re-read, and I could ctrl-F for “West” in the first four books (this is what I do anyway). But within the four walls of this novel, Kleypas indulges her actual worst habit repeatedly, to undercut the characterization of West as established in the preceding books. Her worst habit, that she simply cannot quit, is Sebastian, Viscount St. Vincent.
I, in a word, hate St. Vincent. I find him exceedingly dull, and I resent his continual presence in Lisa Kleypas’ work beyond his book, Devil in Winter, from the Wallflowers series. That book opens after Sebastian has kidnapped and returned Lillian Bowman, seemingly ruining his friendship with Marcus Marsden, Earl of Westcliff, Lillian’s fiancé. Sebastian kidnaps her in the back third of It Happened One Autumn because he needs to marry an heiress to avoid financial ruin. Knowing his dire straits, Evie Jenner, an anxious stuttering friend of Lillian’s arrives at his doorstep and offers to marry him. She wishes to escape her abusive family’s home through marriage and knows that Sebastian won’t say no to her since he is so desperate.
They marry and Sebastian gains access to Evie’s substantial fortune, which includes her father’s gambling club, Jenner’s. The plot of this novel centers, sort of, around Evie’s ultimatum that she won’t sleep with Sebastian again after the consummation of their relationship unless he proves that he can be monogamous by being celibate. But in Kleypas’ world, nothing is more attractive than Sebastian St. Vincent, so while he is trying his damnedest to be celibate, Evie’s attraction to him is growing so much that she is the one who breaks the ultimatum.
St. Vincent is the most popular Kleypas hero and seemingly her favorite. I know this because of the abundance of fan service she provides in returning to this character. Three of the Ravenels’ books center on his children, and in all of those books, he appears as a chilly, self-possessed Duke of Kingston, (having since passed over his Viscount title to his eldest son, Gabriel.) We get unnecessary scenes, plotwise, of him doting over Evie, and assurances that thirty years later, they are just as randy as they’ve always been.
I find St. Vincent, particularly in his book, fairly charmless. And his attraction to the virginal, stuttering Evie, seems to focus on her untouched quality. Never lacking in female affection, St. Vincent comes to heel for Evie, though it is never clear to me why. Every time I reread the book, I misremember the plot, thinking that after Evie gives the sex ultimatum, she is the one who tries to break it, and then Sebastian resolves to keep to the 90-day timeline, to prove to himself, as much to Evie, that he loves her for something other than sex. This is not what happens! Evie caves, more interested in sex as a newlywed than she realized was possible, and St. Vincent jumps at the first opportunity to start having sex with his wife.
Evie’s friends also come to see her at the club, to make sure that Sebastian hasn’t coerced her into marriage (like he was planning to do with her best friend, Lillian). Evie’s explanations of his reformation are suspect and weak to me. I’m not even anti-redemption for a kidnapper in a prequel (Dancing with Clara by Mary Balogh does it better). I’m never satisfied with why Sebastian is motivated to change his ways or his apologies to people he has hurt. But even beyond my distaste for Sebastian’s plot, my big frustration here comes from the fact that he is not a parallel to West, no matter how much Kleypas and Sebastian team up to tell me he is.
Kleypas has about four hero types she draws from: aristocratic rakes, industry tycoons, decorum bullies, and self-deprecating outsiders. To pair up the Wallflower and Ravenel heroes: Sebastian St. Vincent and Devon Ravenel are in the first category, Simon Hunt and Tom Severin are in the second category, Marcus Marsden and Rhys Winterborne the third, and Matthew Swift and West Ravenel the last.4 For four prequel books, we get hints and quips that suggest that West’s raking is more complicated, more deeply-seated than pleasure seeking, that it comes from a core feeling of unworthiness of love. He’s fearful of trusting that Phoebe and her sons could ever love him! He’s on the outside of Devon’s new dutiful role as Earl. He allows himself to be cast as a rake because that’s what his older brother is—when he claims the title “wreck,” it is a moment of clarity, even in his self-loathing.
Sebastian’s raking begets a lack of thoughts toward others, and his romance with Evie teaches him to feel empathy and sympathy for those around him. One askance parallel is how Sebastian and West both turn over new leaves when they get jobs. Sebastian is rakish because he has nothing else to do as a Viscount, and when he becomes busy with Jenner’s, he becomes too busy to sleep around. West is similarly inspired when he is asked to work on the farm, but his lack of industry creates a lack of self-worth, not a self-aggrandizement like St. Vincent. Importantly, St. Vincent was raised as a Viscount! He has no sense of self-doubt that defines West.
Throughout the book, Sebastian appears, expressing approval of West as a match for his daughter, Phoebe. He seems to see something of himself in the man. He tells West early in their acquaintance that the Duke’s heard that West is a “bit of a hellion.” West hears it as a condemnation, but a Kleypas reader knows that this is Sebastian being impressed and aligning the younger man with himself. Sebastian tells Evie early that he means to pair Phoebe with West.
The big swing of Kleypas's drawing parallels between these two characters comes in the final scene of Devil’s Daughter. West has left Phoebe, thinking he cannot be close to her without feeling his inadequacy acutely, even though she’s made it clear she would have him if he would have her. West goes drinking with a friend and ends up at Jenner’s, Sebastian's club. The Duke finds West and puts him up for the night, to have a conversation the next morning.
Before West goes to sleep for the night, he says, “I don’t deserve her.” And Sebastian retorts, “Of course you don’t. Neither do I deserve my wife. It’s an unfair fact of life that the worst men end up with the best women.” The next morning, Sebastian implores West to give the romance a chance, saying, “I understand you, Ravenel. I’ve been in your shoes. You’re afraid, but you’re not a coward. Stand up to this. Stop running.” When considering only this book, Sebastian’s presence during this conversation makes some sense. He was there at the wedding when West and Phoebe met, has endorsed the match from the beginning, and now is the bookend to the story. He could be serving here as the fulcrum between the couple, like West has served for the other couples in the family.
The problem here is the information we know about West from the first four books and his self-assessment! Sebastian has not been in West’s shoes, not really. His situation is much more like Devon Ravenel’s. His father, the old duke, has run the family’s holdings into the ground. As Viscount, Sebastian is powerless to stop it, unless he can effect a correction with his own funds and industry. They’re the aristocratic rakes, whose reforming comes from taking on duty and correcting the last generation’s foibles. They are both inspired to step up by women who are dependent on them, financially and romantically.
That’s not West’s journey at all. Though Kleypas provides the scaffolding to draw parallels between Sebastian and West, through those scenes of Sebastian in Devil’s Daughter, it doesn’t make sense that this speech inspires West to a leap of faith. The conclusion that the worst men end up with the best women serves the vision of the world adopted by the aristocratic rake types. But West does not need to learn that he is actually bad and will always have to work to deserve Phoebe (part of both Devon and Sebastian’s journeys away from their sense of entitlement and bullying of their partners). West believes he is a corrupted man throughout all the books!
What he needs to hear in this moment is that if he cannot find an intrinsic belief that he is good and worthy of love, he needs to trust that Phoebe wouldn’t love someone unworthy, and neither would his family, the initial motivating factor in his transformation. I think the person who should come talk to him is Kathleen, his sister-in-law.
This change would still work structurally in the four corners of Devil’s Daughter because throughout the book, Devon attempts this conversation and fails to convince West of his worthiness. It would work for Kathleen to come in and accomplish what her husband can’t quite pull off because West would trust someone who doesn’t have to love him to tell these hard truths. And importantly, it works with the established relationship between Kathleen and West from the prequels, where he looks up to her and she spurs his self-improvement with her tough love. She’s been a moral compass for him and he’s been an emotional rock for her throughout their friendship.
Kleypas bringing in Sebastian, a fan favorite whom she loves to revisit, undermines the character that I love so much and distorts the arc that she has created across the series. Sebastian’s outsized presence might make sense for a reader who starts with Devil’s Daughter, but in the context of the whole series, West’s emotional arc is betrayed by aligning him with Sebastian. And Kleypas’ nested narratives suggest strongly that she wants the books to be read as a whole unit together, so the disconnect is by her design and is a failure to me.
There are other plotting decisions that I find frustrating in this book, namely the subplot with Phoebe’s husband’s cousin embezzling money from her, but Kleypas loves a dramatic third-act reveal that is immediately resolved. We can be grateful it isn’t a kidnapping in this book. I also wish there were even more scenes of West and Phoebe’s domestic adventure when he helps set up her account books at her estate. I also think we should have gotten an epilogue with a wedding!
The book is still a total comfort read, and I love the scenes of direct romance between Phoebe and West. But it always feels like a half-measure of a novel. When Sebastian gets inserted in the emotional scenes of West’s story, I get the sense that Kleypas does not care about consistently landing the beats she is setting up for this hero. I feel like I’m always asking for books like this book, or like this romance, but so much of the genre doesn’t allow for this unfolding of a character across so many books as a non-romantic lead initially. So I’m even more disappointed when I feel like Kleypas doesn’t stick the emotional landing.
Ben, the shop apprentice, from the Felicity American Girl books; Rhys, the hot teen apprentice sorcerer from Gail Carson Levine’s The Two Princesses of Bamarre, Gilbert Blythe
A lot of my favorite hero traits get sharpened into fine points in West. I have a vast preference for second sons over titled brothers. My most conservative personal taste in romance might be my affection for plots that characterize going to be a farmer as a restorative experience, in contrast with the sin of a city. Far afield of my own personal, strongly urbanist desires, but a consistent theme in books that I love. And I love when there are already kids on the scene, so his romance with single mother Phoebe, Lady Clare featuring a growing affection for her two sons, charms me! Honestly it is unclear if these are things I love naturally, or if I just filter all affection for anyone else through my favorite hero.
Also engaged by Dain from Lord of Scoundrels, Dennis Duffy from 30 Rock, the entire movie Gladiator
In the Hathaways series, Leo Hathaway represents a union of the first and fourth type. Cam and Merripen are both outsiders, but really they're decorum bullies and Harry Hathaway in the industry tycoon. Captain Christopher Phelan is the actual outsider. And Gabriel St. Vincent from Devil in Spring has no personality to speak of.
This was great, and helped articulate my same love & misgivings about the book. I also love the niche trope of “rake gets sent to the farm” mentioned in the second footnote! I think West and Theo from Cecilia Grant’s A Lady Awakened are my top examples. Do you have any others?
Thank you for this insightful review. Cousin West is also my book boyfriend. I've reread the book countless times and return frequently to the West scenes in the previous novels. For me one of his main attractions is that he genuinely likes and admires women. I love what you say about his relationship with Katherine, and I couldn't agree more with your point that she rather than Sebastian, or even Devon, should have been the person who helped him deal with his self-loathing. One of my favorite West-Katherine moments is in book 1, when West calls Devon a numbskull for his heroics after the train crash. "My dear friend ... you would have done the same thing," she tells him. I'm not convinced West would have gone on a long bender after he leaves Phoebe. He may not respect himself but he does respect those he loves and who love him. I think he might have returned to Hampshire. I would loved to have seen Neddy and Brick stage an intervention, but Kleypas isn't genuinely interested in West's relationship with the men who taught him to love the farm, or in the men themselves. Because of the class differences, it’s unlikely they would have been West friends, but he loves, respects, and admires them. His respect for Sebastian relates to his rank and status as Phoebe's father. I like to think Neddy’s good opinion means more to him than Sebastian’s.
This is a tangent, but since you led a discussion on Mary Balogh at Reformed Rakes, perhaps you won't mind. But please delete it if you find it too much of a digression, made even more annoying by its length.
Kit from A Summer to Remember, which I've read so often that the pages are falling out, is a similarly self-loathing hero. I seldom see this book discussed, so it's apparently not a favorite among Balogh's novels. I’m fond of Kit, but his relationship with the heroine, Lauren, is why I keep returning to the book. I find their scenes together sweet and moving. I’m usually too repressed to cry, but I have teared up while reading A Summer to Remember. As you've pointed out elsewhere, Balogh's obsession with forgiveness leads to some egregious examples of victims reconciling with their abusers, but the reconciliation plot in A Summer to Remember works. Kit, like West, is unable to forgive himself, and I believe Balogh is acute in her examination of the psychology of guilt. Kit thinks it's his actions that are unforgivable, but it's actually that his guilt leads him to dismiss the feelings of his younger brother, Sydnam (the hero of Simply Love, the most cringe-inducing of Balogh's novels). When Kit looks at Sydnam, all he sees is Syd's physical wounds, for which he feels responsible. He doesn't view Syd as an individual separate from himself. This is his least attractive quality. I forgive him because as a younger sister, I know older siblings can have a hard time recognizing that their younger siblings are people in their own right. I also let him off the hook because his guilt is understandable, and he's not usually an insensitive dolt. Lauren and Kit's book is one of two prequels to the Bedwyn series. Lauren would seem to be the polar opposite of Freya Bedwyn, who appears in A Summer to Remember. Lauren out-ladies everyone else in the ton, whereas Freya is a hoyden, who apparently doesn't give a damn what anyone thinks of her. But both have their hearts broken and both behave badly afterward. Lauren is seriously unlikeable in One Night of Love, in which she is jilted by her fiancé. She responds by becoming even more insufferably lady-like and treating Lily, the woman who supplants her, with contempt (as an aside, Lily's forgiveness of Lauren in A Summer to Remember is unearned, a relatively minor example of Balogh's privileging of reconciliation over all else). Freya is similarly contemptuous of Lauren, whose own experience of being jilted eventually motivates her compassion toward and understanding of Freya. Both women eventually find love but neither undergoes a transformation in the process. Freya remains a funny and sarcastic hoyden, whom we learn has a soft heart. Lauren continues to be a somewhat typical lady of the ton but one whose self-acceptance and loving nature make her tolerant of others and tolerable to the reader. Jackie Horne at Romance Novels for Feminists writes about Lauren as a heroine who doesn't try to be someone other than she is, even though she kind of wishes she were more like Freya (Who doesn’t?). As I'm writing this, I think Lauren may be my book girlfriend. If I like Phoebe because she shares my love of West, I love Kit because he loves and appreciates Lauren.