Title: The Dark Lady Series: Mad Passions #1
Author: Máire Claremont
Published: January 16, 2013
Genre(s): Romance: Historical
Page Count: 313
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Lord Ian Blake has returned from India a broken man. Years ago, he pledged to Lady Eva Carin—his childhood companion and first love—that he would bring her husband back alive. His failure haunts him. But even his jaded soul can’t anticipate the shocking sight of beautiful, independent Eva confined in a madhouse.
Locked in an asylum, forgotten by society, Eva is adrift in both body and mind. For Ian to break her free, they must cross a powerful enemy—and prove her sanity to England’s unforgiving aristocracy. But the biggest danger of all may come when the secrets of Eva’s tragic past are finally unlocked.
The Dark Lady by Máire Claremont is an angsty Gothic romance that has the guts to try something really unique…but doesn’t have the guts to actually follow through with its premise.
Women in insane asylums. A horrifying reality for many women in the 19th century, especially those who didn’t toe the Party Line. This is where The Dark Lady opens, as Eva cowers in her cell, high on the laudanum her jailors force-feed her, waiting for those same jailors to come and rape her in the night like they always do. The first few chapters of this book are unforgettable, as Claremont slices cleanly through the sanitized portrayals of Victorian England you’re most likely to find in a romance novel.
But, for some reason, the book can’t maintain the combination of reality and Gothic horror for more than those first few scenes. Before long, Eva is rescued by her childhood friend, Ian, and after a quick wand-waving sequence, she’s miraculously free of her opioid addiction and declared mentally competent by no less than Queen Victoria’s own doctor. Magic! Of course there are some very caricaturesque villains in the picture, including Eva’s own now-dead husband. Said villains are vanquished quite easily and the sugary-sweet epilogue would put even the fluffiest romance author to shame.
Basically, what I’m saying is: The Dark Lady is like that little girl who wants so badly to be a rebel but all she does is yell at her parents and yell “you’re not the boss of me!” This book wants to be a dark and angsty Gothic, but is just your average historical romance with some purple prose and a couple chapters set in an insane asylum. Disappointing, to say the least.
The biggest let-down in this whole book is how the author deals with Eva’s addiction. It’s set up to be a massive conflict throughout the first half, as Ian attempts to keep Eva clean while she systematically undermines all of his efforts to get her hands on the drug. Yet as soon as Ian drags her back to his castle in Devonshire and gives her some clean clothes, the addiction is never mentioned again. A) that’s just not realistic, and B) what a missed opportunity! Laudanum was something used by wealthy women all over England, and I think Claremont could have done something really interesting by exploring her protagonists’ struggle with addiction in this context. But, honestly, the addiction issue just wasn’t convenient to the plot any longer, so away it went.
In general, that’s how all of The Dark Lady proceeds. The author tosses in a lot of conflict, but the conflict will only remain so long as it’s convenient. As soon as the conflict is just unnecessarily dragging the story down, it’s zapped into oblivion. In short order, Eva’s addiction, her evil brother in law, and the issue of her sanity are all dealt with and resolved with great dispatch.
The problems in this book are serious, and they should require difficult solutions; instead, everything comes easily to Eva and Ian.
What’s left, then, is plodding, langurous prose that allows for a lot of navel-gazing and angst. And while angst is fine and good, it’s silly to have characters bemoaning their hard lives when some authorial hand in the sky is systematically removing all of the obstacles that bar them from eternal happiness.
I absolutely loved The Dark Lady…for about three chapters. This book is not nearly as good as it seemed likely to be, and I think it’s clear that the issue is poor plotting and lack of follow-through. Máire Claremont isn’t a terrible writer, and she obviously had a good idea. But the different pieces didn’t come together as they should have.
