Anna’s Refuge (Wrackwater Bridge, Book One)
By Kerryn Reid
Wrackwater Press, 2020

Kerryn Reid’s new book, a very well-designed Regency romance titled Anna’s Refuge, telegraphs a bit of its difference from the typical genre paradigm right there on its cover, which shows a hooded young woman - obviously our heroine, 18-year-old society debutante Anna Spain - worried, alone, and visibly pregnant. Hardly the Almack’s-and-flavored-ice frivolities of most Regencies. And that telegraphing is accurate: although Anna’s Refuge sports its share of ballrooms and country estates, it takes daring detours into the slums of Leeds and into the lives of the kinds of people who ordinarily only feature in Regencies as villains or anonymous menials.

Things start off normally enough. Young Anna, guided by her standard Regency-issue brusque, clueless mother and her mother’s stolid, indispensable maid Putnam, is attending her first London season, in search of dances, advances, and a promising offer of marriage to take back home to Bristol. And although the balls and dances are continuing, as far as Anna is concerned, the husband-hunt is over - she’s found the man of her dreams, handsome, charismatic Gideon Aubrey, who’s given her to believe, during dances and in private conversations, that the feeling is very much mutual.

But the book has no sooner kicked off than Anna brutally realizes that the feeling isn’t mutual. Gideon was toying with her, as we learn he’s prone to toy with everybody. At a dance he affects not even to remember her name, and she’s only prevented from making an embarrassing scene by the intervention of Gideon’s sensitive younger brother Lewis, who dances with her and urges her to put a happy face on things (“My brother likes to see the misery he’s caused,” he tells her). 

Lewis is as struck with Anna as Anna had been with Gideon, although he’s hidden that fact from her:

Soon after they met some weeks ago, she’d asked about his taste in literature. “Have you read Mr. Coleridge’s Christabel, Mr. Aubrey?” He could not say yes - it would be a lie - and he did not want to tell her no. He wanted to be the man she dreamed of, as he dreamed of her He’d visited the lending library and borrowed Christabel. Read it, too, and wished he could like it.

It’s doubtful that Reid could have done more to illustrate who the real hero of this book is than to tell us that Lewis endured Coleridge’s Christabel for the object of his affection, but Anna doesn’t know that about him, and soon enough she’s pregnant and publicly spurned by Gideon, forced to flee from the glittering society she’d only just days before expected to be joining. She and Putnam - and eventually little baby Doris - are relegated to the dumps of Leeds, until Lewis comes to the rescue, letting his love of Anna overcome his bitterness at his brother’s scandalous behavior. 

In deft and very readably confident passages, Reid makes it clear that no one has suffered longer at Gideon’s hands than Lewis, who reflects on some of that suffering while talking with his friend Jack Wedbury:

Jack had not needed to check his bed or his shoes for the remains of mutilated toads or kittens. Jack had not been blamed for pinching the maids, or mangling his mother’s precious roses, or pissing into Father’s boots as they sat in the hallway. Jack had not watched a dog die by Gideon’s hand - Lewis never passed that spot in the lane without hearing the pup’s agonized cries.

After so much misery, Reid indulges herself in a happy ending as glowing and protracted as the one at the end of Peter Jackson’s “Return of the King,” but most readers won’t begrudge it. And in the tried-and-true Regency tradition, those readers will both be rooting for Anna and Lewis (and, incidentally, hoping they find more in common than their shared Gideon-trauma) and very much looking forward to the promise implied in the fact that this is the first book in a new series. This is a richer, more textured, and more socially conscious Regency than the genre usually provides; fans of those glittering ballrooms shouldn’t miss it. 

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.