May Fiction

A witty dive into the romantic world of a 19th-century aristocrat is this month’s top literary pick

If you didn’t know that Sophie Irwin once wrote a dissertation on Georgette Heyer—the queen, and possibly inventor, of Regency Romance novels—then it wouldn’t be hard to guess from A Lady’s Guide to Fortune-hunting. Here, too, we’re plunged deep into the world of early 19th-century high society, complete with bounders, upper-class twits, fearsome dowagers and ambitious young women on the make.

And when it comes to the last of these groups, they don’t come much more ambitious than Irwin’s heroine Kitty Talbot. But, as the book makes clear, for a woman in her situation, the only alternative to ambition is destitution. Aged 20, Kitty is the oldest of five Dorsetshire sisters, whose recently deceased parents have left them with unpayable debts. So unless she can bag herself a rich husband, they face complete financial ruin.

It is, therefore, quite a blow when, on page one, the son of the local squire ends their two-year engagement on the solid grounds that he’s found someone posher. Luckily, Kitty is not a woman to grieve for long over what might have been—and less than ten pages later, she’s on the coach to London.

Before long, she’s wangled her way into a friendship with the aristocratic

A Lady’s Guide to Fortune-hunting by Sophie Irwin (Harpercollins, £14.99)

James Walton is a book reviewer and broadcaster, and has written and presented 17 series of the BBC Radio 4 literary quiz The Write Stuff