he's not a duke's duke
aristocrats, part III
This is part III of the Duke Project. I was aiming to finish off dukes in July, but I keep reading more books! This part focuses on books from the 2010s, which is when we start seeing a boom in both the number of romances published and the rate of dukes relative to all historical romance increasing dramatically. Thank you to anyone and everyone who has upgraded to be a paid subscriber! I write Restorative Romance for fun, but these long, reading-heavy projects take up a lot of time. Paid support helps me justify the scale of these projects that I want to keep free for everyone.
The second part of this series was about some hallmark dukes from the first eight decades of genre fiction romance. Once we get to the 2010s, I feel a little less comfortable calling any one book a tentpole in the genre. We’re still experiencing and discovering the ripple effects of that decade, plus this period is when we get the boom of dukes and romance in general: there are just more to choose from here. I don’t like drawing conclusions from a dishonest sample set, so for this decade, I’m only going to focus on Tessa Dare, Sarah MacLean, and Courtney Milan, three authors with whose work I am really familiar and acknowledge upfront the narrowing of my focus.
Their work is where I started when reading historical romance and when I think of the 2010s, these authors are who I think of, particularly when I am tracing the influence to books being published now.1 I considered exclusively full-length novels that feature a hero who is either currently a duke or a ducal heir with substantial discussion of what that means, published between 2010 and 2020.2 By my count, that’s 15 duke books (three Milans, seven MacLeans, and five Dares) and I’ll discuss eight in-depth here.
As I noted in the “Bad Duke Dads” section of the last part of this project, in the 2000s, we’re no longer maintaining family legacies, but correcting them. The meaning of “duke” in a romance novel is now well-established, so every author is writing in a tradition with a well-worn literary precedent that runs parallel to the historical sources. The question of this decade seems to be how we square that literary, romantic precedent with the underlying history of dukes as leaders in and beneficiaries of an immoral and inequitable system of economics and government. This decade is also one where we really move away from the bodice-ripper foundations of the genre, where immoral or morally ambiguous heroes fit neatly.
What we get is heroes who push their largesse to new extremes, even if the references to that benevolence are essentially parenthetical to the plot or emotional stakes, or what it means to be a duke become hyper-personal and any accompanying politics feel like they are in a vacuum, only serving the relationship. If a duke is appealing as a hero to a reader because of his power, wealth, or status, and those values were historically maintained by subjugating others, something has to break if we also demand that the hero must appear “good” or attractive to the modern-day reader. The results I see of this difficulty are “correcting” the politics of a duke or having them subsumed by sympathetic personal stakes.
“good” landlords: Spencer Dumarque, Duke of Morland, Alec Stuart, Duke of Warwick, and Jeremy Wentworth, Duke of Lansing
Other than participation in the House of Lords, aristocrats’ role as landlords was a huge part of what gave them power and money. Even contemporaneously, in books like Sandford and Townsend’s The Great Governing Families of England (1865), Britain acknowledged that owning great swathes of land gave the aristocracy true power, rather than title or supposed ancient lineage, which were, respectively, symbolic or spurious.3 But having tenants in pre-2010s romance novels primarily seems like a space for demonstrated noblesse oblige, if discussed at all. A landlord may be neglectful and this shows moral rot and part of his journey to reconciliation is becoming attentive. A heroine can show industry and compassion through involvement with the estate’s community (from whom her partner extracts capital).4
Still, more often than not in books I’ve read from this period, the relationship between aristocrat and tenant is unexplored or mentioned neutrally and casually. Tenant farmers exist and populate country balls, bailiffs may provide economic or emotional insight to a hero who doesn’t know any better, and large country estates get their money from somewhere. But mostly the system seems to be set-dressing.5
Of course, this system was very much an 18th and 19th-century concern. In 1776 in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith wrote about landlords extracting value from naturally occurring products on their land: “As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce. The wood of the forest, the grass of the field, and all the natural fruits of the earth, which, when land was in common, cost the labourer only the trouble of gathering them, come, even to him, to have an additional price fixed upon them.” To say that this is a primary concern of Karl Marx feels trite! Das Kapital, Volume III from 1894 describes the capitalist mode of agrarian production, with farm laborers working for wages, employed by tenant farmers who engage in farming as a means to capital. The capitalist farmer pays rent to a landowner, who is the end holder of the value produced.6
Landlord-tenant relations were a major subject of Parliamentary reform attempts in the 19th century. Before 1883, the contracts between landlord and tenant farmers were almost entirely self-directed and voluntary, meaning tenants had very little protection from their vastly unequal bargaining position. Landlords could draft leases around any attempted statutory protections. In 1883, the Agricultural Holdings Act made compensation for a tenant’s improvements on the land when they left the lease compulsory on the part of the landlord. Agriculture was the biggest industry in the country, and in the period from 1815-1846, the result of the harvest in a country with a fickle climate was the “most important single factor in regulating cost of living for the lower classes.”7 The Corn Laws, the major Parliamentary question of first half of the Victorian period, forbade the importation of grains until the price of British produced grain reached a certain, very high price, virtually guaranteeing food shortages in years when the harvest was weak.
I don’t think I’ve read a book with a duke from before 2010 that concerns itself directly with the morality of a duke being a landlord or taking rent from his tenants. Certainly, “landlord” in and of itself has not fallen by the wayside as a virtue or an appeal of a hero. Lisa Kleypas wrote Tom Severin, Benevolent Slumlord in 2020!8 But Kleypas cut her teeth writing bodice rippers and the ghosts of that genre’s structure can be seen even in her most recent books. Even if Kleypas saw Severin’s dreams of buying up land and building a town (like handsome Mr. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life) as a moral failure, which I’m not sure she does, I don’t think she would feel the need to reconcile that failure for him to be deserving of an HEA.
But I think for Dare, MacLean, and Milan, who all have at different points called their work feminist or had their work called feminist by interviewers, one element of that seems to be wanting to write “good” or evolved men. So there has to be an attempt to square the qualities inherent in a duke that might complicate that desire for rectitude.
In Tessa Dare’s first duke book, One Dance with a Duke (2010), Spencer Dumarque, Duke of Morland hits a lot of the marks of a sympathetic duke. He was not raised as a duke, so he doesn’t have the inherent self-importance of other aristocrats. He seems taciturn, haughty, and rude, gaining the reputation of the “Duke of Midnight” because he only shows up at ton parties at midnight, and dances with one woman for half an hour. But this quirk is revealed to stem from a panic disorder that makes him nervous in crowds.
We get signals that Spencer takes the weight of being “responsible” for his tenants seriously. He dreamt of glory in the Napoleonic Wars, but “when his father died, Spencer became the late duke’s heir. Suddenly he had a title, duties, responsibilities. He would have been risking hundreds of lives in battle, not merely his own. Farewell, visions of glory.” While aristocrats at large certainly had the option to avoid going to war, the British army very much did have aristocrats in their ranks, though perhaps at a rate lower than what Robert Burnham and Rob McGuigan call the “enduring myth” of an army “filled with nobility who occupied the highest ranks.”9 Of the officers in the British army during the Napoleonic Wars, 2% were aristocrats, meaning around 200 peers were actively in the army any given year between 1805 and 1816. There were only about 300 families in the peerage total at the time, so while the vast majority of the army was working class, it is also true that the vast majority of the country was working class and peerage did not exempt participation in the armed forces.
Still, this is the first hint we have that Spencer frames his decisions around what would be best for the people he is “responsible” for. We have a benevolent patron sort of landlord, for “hundreds” of people. After Spencer and heroine Amelia have their marriage of convenience and they move to his estate, she learns about his horse breeding enterprise. Between the foals his breeds and sending horses out to stud, this business is his main source of income. As a result, he has not raised his tenants’ rents in six years, something that his uncle, the late duke, thought would be the wrong decision. Spencer rejects the option to rent out more of his land to farmers and instead uses it for the horse farm, but his estate is profitable without the rents.
That is the limit of the discussion of Spencer’s relationship with his tenants. But in a book where his arc is slowly revealing that he appears to be one type of duke, but is secretly another, more amiable type of duke, his relationship with his estate can be taken a part of a whole set of signals doing that work, despite his benevolence being pretty perfunctory and limited to “not raising rents.”
In A Scot in Dark by Sarah MacLean (2016) pays a similar surface-level lip service to the idea that we know taking money from the estate would the duke bad and we need him to be good. MacLean often imbibes her world with a fairy tale quality with a high concept plot catalyst (we’ll discuss two of these today). In A Scot in the Dark, the reader’s suspension of disbelief is called up when, in the prologue, seventeen dukes die in surprising circumstances in just two weeks, leading to Scottish Alec Stuart’s unexpected inheritance of the English title and the accompanying properties. One such property is one of the previous duke’s legal wards, who is the heroine of the story. When Lillian, the adult ward, gets embroiled in a scandal in London, Alec discovers both her existence and that he needs to do something about her reputation.
We’re told that Alec has “thousands” of tenants and when he and Lillian are getting to know each other, he reveals that he lives off of money “earned honestly” in Scotland, while remotely managing the ducal tenants and staff who continue to prosper on his many inherited estates. The story does not languish over the details of Alec’s relationship to his tenants’ earnings, nor how strong his moral firewall between himself and touching money raised by the ducal estates is. We know he has easy money at his disposal because he settles twenty-five thousand pounds on Lillian for her dowry to aid in marrying her off after her ruinous scandal. It is also unclear where the “honest” money comes from in Scotland, as distinct from money that Alec views as tainted. Alec’s Scotland is described as wild and natural and the polar opposite of urban and industrial 1830s London. But much of the wealth of Scotland in the 18th century came from the Transatlantic Slave Trade and so much of the shipping associated with the colonial British Empire in the 19th century went through Glasgow, that the city was known as the “Second City of the Empire.”
This is a very small part of the book! And I don’t think MacLean needs to spell out all these things in detail—but again, we see an author choosing to include an almost throwaway line about divesting from expectations of how a duke earns his money as a surprise to their romantic partner, without that angle being a substantial part of the plot. These dukes are not like the other dukes the heroines have met before, they’re cool dukes. They’ll let you drink in the house and keep a slightly larger portion of the profits that your labor created.
By 2020, we do have an example in this dataset of a more robust confronting of the duke-as-landlord plot. In Courtney Milan’s The Duke Who Didn’t, Jeremy Wentworth, Duke of Lansing has been attending the Wedgeford Trials since he was a child. The Trials are a festival/competition of sorts that takes over the small hamlet annually. But Jeremy has never told his friends in Wedgeford two things: that he is a Duke and that technically, he owns the land that they are living on. He could never keep the fact that he was wealthy and upper class a secret, but as a child visiting, he wanted friends, not tenants, and then in the later years, it felt too late to reveal his secret.
Jeremy’s mother was Chinese and hated being a duchess, so he has at best, apathy towards his role as duke. After his father died, Jeremy and his mother returned to China until he was eleven, when an aunt came to fetch him, insisting that a Duke of Lansing must learn to duke in England. The Wedgeford land had long been subject to “benign neglect” by the line of dukes, where they neither collected rent nor paid for improvements. The Wedgeford people have taken it upon themselves to make the town what it is, appropriating buildings as they see fit for their community needs.
Milan is a lawyer, and while I don’t extol the virtues of my profession often, she has thought about the details of the property rights thoroughly. Jeremy has already arranged so that when he dies, the unentailed Wedgeford land will go to its residents. He has no interest in collecting the fifty-three years of back rents. The main conflict comes from his hiding his ducal status from the community and Chloe Fong, a childhood sweetheart, who is a working-class cook along with her father in the town, Jeremy also has the habit of leaving Wedgeford after the trials are over. Chloe has been in love with Jeremy for ages but is uninterested in any man who is flighty or doesn’t mean what he says.
I won’t spoil how the conflict itself gets resolved, but by the end of the book, Jeremy believably comes up with a way to say [Joan Didion voice] “goodbye to all that.” He is still duke and still has a fortune, relative to many of the residents of Wedgeford, but the sustaining funds for the couple are ultimately not rents from farmers, but rent from leasing out the ducal estate that they choose not to use and the business that they run together.
Not every attempted reconciliation for a duke comes down to his dismissal of his landed interest. Though much of a duke’s power comes from landholdings, another source is the vague honor and deference given to the title itself as an elevated class position. Another way to “redeem” the hero from ducal depravity is to have him express a distaste or mistrust of a system that would treat him differently by circumstances of fate or birth.
class traitors: Mr. Chase Reynaud, Ewan Carrick, Duke of Marwick, Robert Blaisdell, Duke of Clemont
In The Governess Game by Tessa Dare (2018), Mr. Chase Reynaud wants never to marry or have children because he feels responsible for the death of his cousin, who he considers the rightful heir to the dukedom. Chase already has power of attorney over the old duke, so he has set up trusts for his servants, another example of a single-line of explanatory largesse to explain away that he is a good future duke. But he is also a ducal heir who struggles to understand why defending his mistress, who is his wards’ governess, in public against innuendo would reveal her status to gossips, or embarrass her at all. Chase is angry at a world that would give him power after he failed to protect his cousin and also struggles to see how, through that position, he is already inoculated from hurt in ways his love interest, Alex, is not.
The resolution of Chase’s distaste for the class position is highly personal though—he fears forming any connections with people he is “responsible” for, his wards or his governess, out of guilt over his cousin’s death. Plus he also had a bad dad who was an inattentive second son who married for money. Accepting his position as duke is primarily about trusting the love others have for him. While there is discussion of the suitability of Alex, the heroine, as a duchess, it is really a smokescreen for Chase’s fears about their relationship. Chase can correct the signaled problems with the aristocracy by repairing his relationship with Alex. Chase has more issues with the institution of the aristocracy at large compared to a duke like Simon Basset from Julia Quinn’s The Duke and I, who similarly swears off having children with the aim of having the line go extinct. But the solution is the same: accept a smiley hoyden into your heart and you’ll correct the sins of your predecessor.
Of Sarah MacLean’s dukes, the most direct rejection of the aristocracy comes in Daring and the Duke (2020). Like A Scot in the Dark, this book also has a high-concept beginning. Three illegitimate half-brothers are born to a duke, all on the same day, from three separate mothers. The wife of the duke has an illegitimate daughter, also on the same day, so the old duke has her baptized as a boy, with the intention of replacing her with one of the illegitimate sons at some time in the future. Starting when the boys are twelve, the duke brings them to his estate and proceeds to Hunger Games them in a competition for the title. The favored son betrays the other two and they escape with the daughter and go to London. The escapees form the Bareknuckle Bastards, a crime organization that illegally imports goods to get around tariffs and also does prize fighting in Covent Garden. The first two books in the series are the other brothers’ stories and we get hints at the past and the personality of the brother who became duke.
Ewan, the brother who stays, now lives as Robert Carrick, Duke of Marwick, the name that Grace, the daughter, was baptized under. Grace and Ewan both have a very acute reason to hate the dukedom because of their abusive father, though Grace believes that Ewan betrayed the other children to secure the title for himself. Ewan has earned a reputation as a mad duke after his brothers told him that Grace had died. But after learning that she is alive and a time jump in the book, Ewan returns to the ton to select a bride. This infuriates Grace because of a childhood pact to punish their father’s obsession with extending the title by refusing to have heirs to the title, which would lead to a reversion of the title to the Crown.
Spoilers for Daring and the Duke: though MacLean is less concerned with any of the mechanics of power gained by Ewan through his title, the book does conclude with his total divestment from it. He burns down his own house and fakes his own death or at least the death of the man known as the Duke of Marwick. Ewan is now free to go live in Covent Garden with his brothers and Grace. Though their issues with the aristocracy stem from their abuse, Grace and Ewan do see the whole system as a stain and have to rend themselves from it to get to their HEA.
The hero of The Duchess War by Courtney Milan (2012) goes one step further: he’s aiming to bring down the whole aristocracy. Robert Blaisdell, Duke of Clermont, once again has a Bad Duke Dad. His father used Robert to punish his mother for leaving their household, so he grew up with an abusive father and a distant mother who walled herself from any affection. Robert’s father, with his privileges as duke and lack of available punishment, raped a woman who gave birth to Robert’s half-brother, Mr. Oliver Marshall, who he met at school as a child.
The heroine, Minnie, is under suspicion of circulating seditious pamphlets, suggesting that the workers of a local factory organize. She is quiet and observant and discovers that Robert is the one writing them. He does so in part to suss out who at the local office is prosecuting falsely seditious behavior (labor organizing on its face would not be seditious, since it is not organizing against the government, yet men are prosecuted anyway), and in part because as a peer, he is exempt from prosecution for this act.
Robert is a new sort of Duke in this universe. When Minnie first hears of him, she thinks “Handsome, young, and unassuming? Far too good to be true. Dukes in reality were paunchy, old, and demanding,” recalling Whitney’s reaction to Clayton, Duke of Claymore’s claim to be a duke on their first meeting in Whitney, My Love. Robert, unlike Clayton, spends his time finding people injured by the industry that gave his family their fortune, particularly those who were imprisoned for attempting to organize unions. He quietly offers them pensions as a form of restoration.
But that is Robert’s personal correction, like Chase attempting to build walls between himself and his title, or Alec refusing to use the money from the dukedom that he views as tainted. Milan does have Robert zoom out to the big picture and attempt to make a political correction, though I grouped him here because his aim is less about his landed interest—his main political aim is the abolition of the House of Lords10 or at least the privileges of peers to be tried in that body for crimes instead of in front of a jury and the House of Lords power of veto over bills passed in the House of Commons, both of which reforms Milan notes in her author’s note have been adopted.
Either through divestment of their landed interest or distaste for the aristocracy, the dukes here signal to heroine and reader that they are different from the dukes we’ve heard about before. In this decade, we don’t just need dukes to become good people through their romantic arcs, we need them to be revealed as good people, worthy of the heroine’s love. This distinction feels like a structurally meaningful shift as a reader and I think it is even more obvious how differently built these books are then their precedents when we look at dukes who are not expressly political in their redemptions.
trauma duking: Griffin York, Duke of Halford, and Malcolm Bevingstoke, Duke of Haven
Besides signaling some sort of progressive political awareness to tell us that these dukes are Good Dukes, the other option is extricating the meaning of duke from the context that makes it inherently morally suspect. To allow for conflict, there may still be immorality associated with the title, but it is now primarily personal rather than systematic. The title becomes a stand-in for masculinity writ large: powerful men who are powerful because they are in romantic relationships with members of a subjugated class (women). The power wielded by the dukes gets them their way in relationships, not in Parliament or on their estate.
This dynamic is standard fare in romance, but now we get a personal explanation of why the dukes are acting like that. Their relationship to the title is defined by personal trauma and anguish and the title and power are used as tool to move past that harm. The methods of these dukes look similar to the more political dukes discussed above, but how they shape their power works differently in the structure of romance because it is circumscribed exclusively by romantic motivations.
This actually isn’t that different from some earlier dukes. To return to Whitney, My Love again, Clayton’s primary use of his ducal power is to control Whitney in their relationship. In the 2010s, I see authors meeting almost an unofficial mandate that that behavior requires a explanation beyond “the duke is [insert vice] because he is a duke and that’s what the title means.” This also doesn’t mean older books only have “bad” guys as dukes. Though Clayton’s control and entitlement manifest in abuse of Whitney, Wulfric Bedwyn from Slightly Dangerous would never intentionally hurt someone. He just, matter-of-factly, is a duke and it means that he is controlling of his siblings’ lives, exacting in his standards, and emotionally closed off. Jervaulx from Flowers from the Storm is a reprobate11 because he enjoys sex and his status as duke means he gets to have a lot of sex. None of this behavior get explained away as much as each hero goes on a journey to fit their ducal selves into the lives of their heroines. The arc is one of transformation of self rather than revelation of information.
Tessa Dare, out of every author I’ve read, has perfected the rhythm of her traumatized hero beats. This pattern may come across as rote within her world, but it is a formula that works for her. Any Duchess Will Do12 (2013) is an exemplar of those beats and the duke’s relationship to his title is pretty limited to his personal life. Griffin York, Duke of Halford, wakes up in a carriage, having been drugged and kidnapped by his mother, the dowager duchess. His mother wants Griff to shape up; he’s been a debauched rake for too long for too long and she wants grandchildren. So they are going to Spindle Cove, Dare’s invention of a little hamlet in Sussex, where all the women seem to be unconventionally beautiful, well-born spinster hoydens. The Duke of Halford “oversee[s] a vast fortune, six estates, several hundred employees, and thousands of tenants,” but his lineage is a storied one and he is falling short.
Like many a duke before, Griff also swore to have the line end with him, but not because he hates his parents. He is in a state of depression after losing his illegitimate daughter only six days after her birth: he has told no one of the loss and is white-knuckling his grief. So Griff won’t take up with a potential bride that he could actually marry, so when his mother points to the spinsters of Spindle Cove and says “pick one and I’ll My Fair Lady her into a suitable duchess,” Griff chooses the least suitable woman he can find: Pauline Simms, a working class serving girl in the town. Pauline sees his scheme and doesn’t take it seriously, until Griff offers a side deal: come along with me and get my mother off my back and you’ll make a thousand pounds. The fortune is enough for Pauline to have the chance to leave her abusive father and care for her disabled sister.
In his interactions with Pauline and his mother, Griff plays the part of a cheeky, if somewhat depressed, rascal. He needles his mother and flirts with Pauline. The dukedom is primarily defined through the dowager’s lessons to Pauline and Griff and Pauline’s mutual assumption that Griff’s issues would seem laughable to Pauline when he has so much more status and wealth than she. More than any other hero, Griff reminds me of Simon Basset, Duke of Hastings, both in personality and plot. But I think importantly in The Duke and I the reader knows the extent of Simon’s tragic back story with his abusive father much earlier than Daphne does. Also for the reader of each book, the tension and conflict of The Duke and I is not about the question of “what happened to Simon?” while that is left unanswered for Griff’s reader for 2/3 of the book. This shift changes the framing and stakes of the conflict, though they share similar swearing off of progeny.
Griff makes repeated references to the lack of viability of their relationship, which Pauline reads as him saying “this won’t work because I’m a duke and you’re a serving girl.” After his confession of his grief, the duke takes pains to makes sure Pauline knows he loves her because of her background, not despite it, though he still suggests marrying in a way that won’t reveal her background to the ton. Pauline leaves him, feeling he wants to hide her true nature. Once Pauline returns to Spindle Cove and successfully sets up her lending library for women (she’s a Dare heroine, she has to have a hot girl hobby), Griff comes back in a few months with a plan: he’ll systematically give away his fortune. He’s already gone from being the fourth richest man in England to the fourteenth. Pauline sees this as Griff finding a purpose in his life again and accepts his proposal.
So Griff divests, or at least plans to, like Jeremy from The Duke Who Didn’t, or Ewan in Daring and the Duke, but the only real reason to is to serve the romance, despite Pauline saying he is “doing it for himself.” Being rich and a duke never caused conflict for Griff, unlike Jeremy or Ewan. It just isn’t as multivalent a gesture or act as the other two books. The last book I’ll discuss has perhaps the most actual politicking we see with a duke any book discussed in this part of the project, but again, the political acting is to serve as an exclusively romantic gesture.
In The Day of the Duchess, we literally see Malcolm Bevingstoke, Duke of Haven in the House of Lords twice. Still, I classed it as a trauma duke because, for all of Malcolm’s parliamentary power, he is using that sway to conduct his romance. Contrast this with either of Milan’s dukes that I’ve discussed or even the dukes who incidentally espouse progressive relationships to their title or power. The book opens with Seraphina, Duchess of Haven storming into the House of Lords, demanding an Act of Parliament to grant the couple a divorce. The story is a dual timeline, one starting when Sera and Mal meet, and one when Sera asks for a divorce.
The pair had been a love match, but through a series of miscommunications and cross-class machinations by both mothers-in-law, Mal becomes convinced that Sera married him for her title. He then cheats on her in public while she is pregnant. Mal’s infidelity is not grounds for divorce because of the double standard of divorce laws, but Sera lets him believe she has been unfaithful as well, and she attempts to goad him into suing himself.
Mal does have a classic setup for a loveless childhood home: a duke for a father who “looked past him, failure and something worse in his gaze…[s]omething like loathing, as though he’d happily erase his son from time and space if it would give him back the life he’d once had” and a mother who had been so focused on social climbing to the role of Duchess that she didn’t know what to do when she got there and begat an heir. Mal believes that all women are mercenarily seeking his title like his mother did with his father, and that love is a fiction for dukes. Ten minutes after he meets Seraphina, he changes his position and knows he is going to marry her for love. But he doesn’t court her formally immediately, instead openly flirting with Seraphina, hurting her reputation and leading her mother to convince her that he has no intention of ever proposing.
Simultaneously, Mal has convinced himself that she might say no to a proposal because she seemingly doesn’t care about his title or fortune. He has convinced himself that if he goes to her father first, the yes will be guaranteed because her father, the Earl, would never say no to a duke. He thinks if they have sex before they get married, she will have to say yes. But when they secret away together, Sera’s mother finds them. Mal immediately proposes but reads on Sera’s face that she feels guilty about the situation, leading him to conclude that she colluded with her mother to trap him, which is his greatest fear.
When Sera becomes pregnant from their one night together, Mal acts out and cheats, convinced that the woman he loves duped him and has saddled him with a child that will grow up in a house like his childhood home, with bitter resentment between the parents. When Sera loses the child, Mal realizes that he still loves her, but she leaves him to go to America, paid off by Mal’s bitter mother before he can apologize and make things right.
In the later timeline, Mal agrees not to fight the divorce if Seraphina gives him six weeks at their country estate, ostensibly to help him find a new duchess. He openly thinks in the narrative that he is going to use the six weeks to win Seraphina back. He spends most of this timeline seducing her and trying to secure her affections, through his charming and powerful self. Though they sleep together again and mourn their daughter together, she refuses to stay with him as his wife. What convinces her to return is when he uses his power in the House of Lords to whip votes in favor of the divorce. They get divorced and then immediately recouple.
To Mal, being a duke only really has meaning in the context of his marriage prospects, his relationship, and what it was like to be raised by a loveless marriage, despite the set dressing of the plot taking place in the setting where dukes wielded their legislative power. We only see him using that power in order to win back his wife. I can’t imagine what Mal is like as a landlord or a politician because it just isn’t within the scope of the novel.
This focus is not inherently positive or negative—the balance of romance and mechanics of borrowed historical setting is a judgment call made by every histrom author. Readers may have a wide variety of taste for that balance. But when there’s a need for the duke in a historical romance archetype to also be a “good” person, there’s a tendency for the corrective explanation to feel tacked on. When the corrective behavior is political in nature, it often has little to do with the romantic plot. When it is primarily personal, it doesn’t really solve the issue of the morality of being a duke, a political position that is based on undemocratic power.
This is a major mode of writing dukes that I see, starting in this decade and continuing into 2020s and at times, it can create some cognitive dissonance. I’ve spoken before about how historical romance often relies on borrowed world building, particularly when it is set in the 19th century because we have so many books set during this period in the genre. There’s a baseline knowledge that authors may assume some genre readers have and if they don’t have it, because it is history, they look it up. How the ton “works” is not explained in every book, the stakes of the aristocracy don’t get expounded upon in every title, oblique references to Napoleon don’t need to come with reminders that England is at war with France.
But this also means that, when the stakes are narrowed and not buttressed with world building of the universe of the novel, readers may bring a certain level of historical context to the story themselves. So when I read a duke, I know he is legislator and likely has a large landed interest. To me, this does not disqualify him as a potentially interesting romantic lead of a story, even if I think being a landlord, particularly for vast self-enrichment, is a moral harm, and even if I know that his historical counterparts likely were very conservative, self-serving men. However, when then the book sells the hero as an evolved, equitable man, the edges of that closed universe can strain under the pressure of the fantasy.
As I said, I partially chose these authors because I do enjoy their work, even when I have occasional frustrations with them. But I mean for this project to be descriptive of what is happening in romance, rather than prescriptive of what I think books ought to have. From Dare, MacLean and Milan’s 2010s dukes as a sample, I start to see how we got where we are in the 2020s. Those strains are becoming cracks in the foundation of more and more books for me as a reader. The next part will look at the dukes published after COVID and the current state of the duke market.
recommendations
It Should Happen to You (1954, dir. George Cukor): Judy Holliday is one of my all time favorite screen presences. This is a mean romance, where nearly every behavior by every character is mean-spirited in some way or another. Maybe that doesn’t sound like an endorsement, but it is the kind of thing Cukor pulled off regularly: The Philadelphia Story, My Fair Lady, Holiday, Adam’s Rib
Il Gattopardo, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa: I’m reading this very slowly in Italian right now, but I can’t get over how beautiful and funny the sentences are. Maybe the funny is overstated because it takes me so long to realize the punchlines of them, but I love Tomasi’s writing voice!
Taskmaster AU S1: Writing a whole non-romance romance about a Taskmaster season feels a little silly, but this one task performed by Danielle Walker and the pride in the face of Taskmaster’s assistant, Tom Cashman, is one of the only times I understood why people write and read fanfiction.
I would also group Meredith Duran and Sherry Thomas in here and as much as I love their books, I am excluding them for a few reasons. Duran has written two dukes, The Duke of Shadows and Fool Me Twice. I’ve read The Duke of Shadows and for reasons that I can’t quite put my finger on, despite its title, it just doesn’t read like a “duke” book. The hero is a duke, other identities and conflicts are much more central. The Duke of Shadows is fantastic and I do recommend it, mostly because it is so singular. But only two duke titles across an author’s body of work makes any seen patterns less reliable.
Sherry Thomas, similarly, has two dukes, the fantastic Private Arrangements and Beguiling the Beauty. But she also stopped writing histrom in 2014. She is my favorite author of the 2010s, but her work does not stretch across the decade’s trends in the same way.
I know this is a slightly long decade, but I’m grouping 2020 with the 2010s because the final look at books will be our “current moment” of dukes and I think that “current moment” in publishing starts after COVID.
To return to another Kleypas example: in Cold-Hearted Rake, when Devon inherits the title Earl of Trenear, one of the ways that he shows Kathleen and the reader that he is turning over a new leaf is that he cares about his tenants’ livelihoods, which he will protect with the earnings from the vein of ore that is on the Eversby Priory land.
Even the romance novel that I would point to most acutely as Marxist, Forever and Ever by Patricia Gaffney deals with labor questions of the dynamic between business owner and worker. The land-owning book in the series, To Have and To Hold, is one where a hero is partially “restored” through interest in tending to his property.
Marx from Das Kapital for additional framework: “The prerequisites for the capitalist mode of production therefore are the following: The actual tillers of the soil are wage labourers employed by a capitalist, the capitalist farmer who is engaged in agriculture merely as a particular field of exploitation for capital, as investment for his capital in a particular sphere of production. This capitalist farmer pays the landowner, the owner of the land exploited by him, a sum of money at definite periods fixed by contract, for instance, annually (just as the borrower of money-capital pays a fixed interest), for the right to invest his capital in this specific sphere of production. This sum of money is called ground-rent, no matter whether it is paid for agricultural land, building lots, mines, fishing grounds, or forests, etc. It is paid for the entire time for which the landowner has contracted to rent his land to the capitalist farmer. Ground-rent, therefore, is here that form in which property in land is realised economically, that is, produces value. Here, then, we have all three classes — wage-labourers, industrial capitalists, and landowners constituting together, and in their mutual opposition, the framework of modern society.”
Norman Gash, Aristocracy and People: Britain 1815-1865, 28 (1979).
“The residents will have to move,” Tom said defensively, “regardless of whether or not the railway line is built. Believe me, it will be a mercy for those people to be forced out of those hellholes.” “But where will they go?” Cassandra asked. “That’s not my business.” “It is if you buy the tenement buildings.” Chasing Cassandra, Lisa Kleypas
Robert Burnham and Rob McGuigan, The British Army Against Napoleon: Facts, Lists and Trivia, 1805-1815, 16 (2010).
“But that is only part of what I hope to see in my life. If I had my way, I would abolish the hereditary peerage in its entirety.” She gasped. “Every aspect of it,” he said fiercely. “Lords should be indicted like commoners and tried by juries. We should not have the right to reject laws that Commons proposes. In fact, I don’t think the House of Lords should exist at all. I wish to hell I was simple Mr. Blaisdell. My father—you have no idea how dreadful he was.” The Duchess War, Courtney Milan
Another Presbyterian word creeping in
For better or worse, I still weep when I read this book.