By: Harper St. George

I saved this book to read on a recent vacation as evidenced by my photograph above. Did the cover complement the ocean? Yes, yes it did. Does my new found twinning ability make me a Kardashian now? This is a genuine question. Whether or not you have a vacation planned that would allow you to match the book cover to your surroundings, The Lady Tempts An Heir is a delightful escape to the fabulous wealth and intrigue of the late 1800s. I am a huge fan of the first book in St. George’s Gilded Age Heiresses series The Heiress Gets A Duke. While the Heiress is still one of my favorite romance novels, I absolutely recommend the Lady as well, with one TRIGGER WARNING caveat: the heroine suffers from infertility. Depending on your own experiences, this may be a book you want to skip if this is an issue for you or a loved one. In my opinion, the characters handle this news realistically, but with genuine compassion. Truthfully, I feel this novel should be getting more love than I have seen on social media and the like. Now that I am a Kardashian, I will see what I can do about this! 

While you do not need to read the first two books of the series to enjoy this novel, doing so makes for a richer reading (and truly, if you enjoy historical romances with smart, feminist heroines, Heiress is a book you do not want to miss) as both main characters are minor players in the prior novels. Maxwell Crenshaw is a third generation American industrialist. He is in charge of the American branch of Crenshaw Iron Works and has made several trips to London to assist his younger sisters, August and Violet, from their parents’ social-climbing machinations of selling their daughters in marriage to British aristocracy as detailed in the first two books in the series. 

During these visits, he meets Lady Helena March, a young widow involved with progressive charities. She is a good friend to his sisters and helped them navigate British aristocratic society. As with all of the books in this series, Lady is written against the backdrop of society’s view of a woman as a second-class citizen and the heroine chafes against these restrictions. Helena is of the British aristocracy, both by birth and of her first marriage. As a widow, she is afforded more leniency and freedom than an unmarried woman, but even still, she is pressured to remarry by her parents. Her unmarried status disrupts her new charitable venture, one that would provide housing and care for unmarried pregnant women and their children, but acquaintances refuse to contribute because they fear her association with these women will influence her own decisions, and is therefore damaging her reputation. If Helena is married, and her husband approved of her new charity, people would be more inclined to donate their money. 

Maxwell, along with his sister, August, and his father, run Crenshaw Iron Works. It was a company started by Maxwell’s grandfather, originally a humble coal miner. Through grit and determination, he forged a large, lucrative company, allowing Maxwell’s father to offer his heiress daughters in marriage to cash strapped British aristocrats. As Lady opens, Maxwell’s father has suffered a heart attack. After nearly dying, his father is consumed by establishing his legacy and orders Maxwell to marry or he will derail a project brainstormed by August. Max knows that this would not only further alienate his sister from their father, it would also crush her entrepreneurial spirit. 

Maxwell and Helena hatch a plan that is always deployed in books, yet I have never seen in real life: the fake dating trope. (My practical heart can never make any sense of this trope, and YET I love it.0. If they are engaged, Maxwell can act as a cover for Helena’s charity and Helena, with her aristocratic background, is a perfect bride to stall Maxwell’s father’s machinations. While pretending to court each other, the two find themselves falling in love. 

The main hurdle for the love interests (as mentioned in the TW above) is that Helena knows she is unable to conceive children. Her first marriage soured due to the fact she could not produce an heir for her husband. His ill treatment of her, and her own sadness, mixed in with society’s pressure of a woman’s usefulness, causes Helena to refuse Maxwell’s true offer of marriage. She knows that a Crenshaw heir is important to Maxwell and she cannot bear to disappoint him, as she did her first husband. I thought this part of the novel was handled really well: a lot of times in romance novels, a baby magically appears in the final chapter, which is not always the case in real life. Infertility is such a lonely, but also prevalent condition, so I appreciated the author’s depiction of it. I also thought Helena’s rejection of Maxwell as a safety measure for her heart seemed true to her character. While their reunion is based upon a bit of a weird note for me, it was a satisfying conclusion to their love story. 

While I do still enjoy the first book in this series the best, I found this to be a really enjoyable book. I am a fan of St. George’s writing and I look forward to reading St. George’s final book in this saga when it is released sometime next year. 

Rating: 4/5