Dunmore strikes the right note—again!

Portrait of a Scotsman (League of Extraordinary Women #3) by Evie Dunmore

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

So many themes woven into this fascinating Victorian romance series centered around the League of Extraordinary Women—a group of women suffragettes who all met in Oxford. 

Underneath this tale pulses the dark aspects of the coal mining industry.

Harriet Greenfield, from a moneyed family, is studying art and painting under Ruskin at Oxford. (How she’s treated here is further illumination about the gap between the sexes!) Her desire to see one of the masters in a private collection leads down a somewhat convoluted path to being married to the imposing, secretive investor, Lucien Blackstone, dubbed Beezlebub and a business rival of her father.

As I said, Hattie is not only an artist, she’s also part of a suffragette movement, her closest friends being in that circle. All are feisty and determined. On the surface Hattie appears decorative and unfocused. She is so much more.

This seemingly simple romantic work with its ‘marriage of convenience’ trope displays the Victorian social mores of a wife’s role, the legalities of the time between husband and wife, ownership and so much more.

Hattie and Lucien travel to Scotland to look at a mine he’s bought from his arch enemy, the Earl of Rutland. Reasons for that enmity are slowly dispelled to us throughout the story, one drop at a time. It’s in the Scottish lowlands that Hattie and Lucien finally come to explore their intimate relations (reasons for that lie in the marriage itself). Fascinatingly it’s here that Hattie’s artistic gift is given an opportunity to acquaint herself with photography. How that comes about is both poignant and devastating, opening Hattie’s eyes (and ours) to life in this community, giving even more insight into mining conditions and affects encompassing the social, economic iniquities and health aspects. I was struck by Hattie’s juxtaposition of symbolism she uses in her photographs and her reasons for that, like that of young Anne, a mining child holding a parasol. 

I was so impressed by Dunmore’s research and the themes she integrated into Lucien and Harriet’s story. Including “art as a vehicle for change,” marital relationships and rights in Victorian times, working in the pits, disasters, and the suffrage movement at this time.

A special read!

A Berkley Group ARC via NetGalley