I think I would have enjoyed Gentle Rogue much more if I weren’t still cringing and jumping at the slightest shadows after Whitney, My Love. Gentle Rogue is the sort of over the top set of improbable circumstances that is probably best described as a “romp.” This isn’t a book for historical accuracy—it’s for sheer ridiculousness. Just look at the original Fabio cover, one of the old skool covers that gets parodied by Cosmo.
Book details:
Title: Gentle Rogue
Author: Johanna Lindsey
Original publication date: 1990
Setting time & place: 1818 London/Connecticut
He is… a 36 year old English viscount who’s recently given up moonlighting as a gentleman pirate.
She is… a 22 year old heiress of a Connecticut shipping line, loyal to family, country, and the fiance impressed by the British during the War of 1812.
Reasons to read this title: Admirable inclusion of practical details, entertaining family dynamics.
My review of Gentle Rogue
Is it a romance novel? Yes. Two characters overcome emotional and physical hurtles to find an HEA together.
Is it a must read romance novel? It’s a mixed bag with some highly problematic elements. I’d read if you have an interest in seagoing romance, pirates, and/or ridiculous old skool.
Our hero, James Malory, is a dissipated rake from a family of dissipated rakes. We learn early on that he’s brought his 17 year old bastard son into the wider family. He’s ready to tap anything in skirts, and when he encounters our heroine dressed as a boy in a tavern for Reasons, he’s willing to expand that to “anything with a nice ass.” So imagine his joy when he discovers the same cute butt in boy’s clothing signed up as his cabin boy…
Meanwhile heroine Georgina Anderson, at 22, is somehow passing herself off as a 12 year old boy to the rest of the ship’s crew, who haven’t had a chance to grab her ass. And they don’t get any chance, because Captain Mallory installs her in his cabin and the rest of the crew ceases to exist on the succeeding three sea voyages.
Least plausible part of this book? It’s a tossup between a) the heroine misidentifying her body’s physical response to the hero as “nausea whenever he gets too close” and b) no one noticing that the captain and the cabin boy are getting hot and heavy four times a day. I’ve been to a lot of maritime museums and those ships are not that big.
That said, Lindsey acknowledges and includes a lot of practical details that give the impression that the story is grounded in reality while you’re reading. How often do you ever see book characters going to the bathroom? As a much younger reader, I remember noticing that Laura Ingalls never had to pee. Georgina does, though, and James walks in on her while she’s making use of the chamberpot. She also mentions the painful consequences of binding her breasts, and her difficulty in being stinky after a week onboard the ship with no bathing opportunity due to her gender subterfuge.
Well, he’d startled her all right. If the color of her cheeks was any indication, she was going up in flames of mortification, too. But he was still the more startled. What a bloody dense ass he was, not to have considered how a female pretending not to be a female would manage such things as bathing and nature’s calls, even changing her clothes, on a ship full of men.
The age difference between the couple is also explicitly dealt with in the text. Georgina and James take turns teasing each other (and having their feelings hurt) about their respective ages.
I also liked that she was pregnant after the three weeks of non-stop sexy times — sometimes it seems like the heroines (in the age of peak fertility) conveniently never fall pregnant until the baby epilogue. This book acknowledged her pregnancy as a minor plot point, but it didn’t magically make their relationship work, which is also a wrinkle I appreciated.
So, I liked the down to earth details included in the book. What I did not like was the predatory setup. Have you ever seen a cat play with their prey? Letting it kinda escape, just so they can pounce on it again and again, while the mouse or whatever is terrified and increasingly wounded, and it’s not cute, just cruel and tragic for the mouse, even though the cat is extremely entertained? That’s how James Malory approaches his discovery of nubile young woman on his ship, under his power.
She was a mystery, all right, and one he meant to solve. But first he was going to amuse himself with her charade by installing her in his cabin and letting her think his cabin boy always slept there. He would have to pretend he didn’t recognize her, or let her assume he simply didn’t remember their encounter. Of course, there was the possibility that she might not remember it, but no matter. Before the voyage was over, she’d share more than his cabin. She’d share his bed.
He has her sleep in his cabin, parades around naked, and even makes her wash his back while he’s in the bath. She thinks he thinks she’s a boy, while he’s getting his dirty old man jollies.
A splendid fantasy, where he would play the innocent, unsuspecting male attacked by his wanton cabin boy. He would protest. She would beg sweetly for his body. He would then do the gentlemanly thing and give in.
Only, since she is misidentifying her desire as “nausea,” his grand plan fails and he has to go to plan b: make her read to him from an erotic book and massage his temples until he can get close enough to kiss her, and then immediately fuck her in one scene that goes from “haha I knew you were a girl” to “you’re a woman now” very quickly.
I do not like that set up.
I do not like it in a house. I do not like it with a mouse. I do not like it here or there. I do not like it anywhere.
It’s a yucky power imbalance and it stinks. Maybe he’s a “gentle rogue” because he never forces her physically, but we’re still right back at Pamela: a treatise on workplace harassment. There’s even a scene where he chases her around a desk, I kid you not.
She stopped moving around the desk only when he did. She’d kept her glass in hand and somehow managed not to spill a drop. She set it down now and glared at him. He looked back with a grin.
“I quite agree, George. You’re not really going to make me chase you around this thing, are you? This is the sport of doddering old fools and parlormaids.”
“If the shoe fits,” she retorted automatically, then gasped, realizing her mistake.
All traces of humor left him. “I’ll make you eat the bloody shoe this time,” he growled low just before he leaped over the desk.
Later, however, our heroine makes a number of speeches about her sexual liberation to her brothers (also a set of belligerent yet lovable womanizers).
You can all just stop it. So I made a mistake. I’m sure I’m not the first woman to do so, and I won’t be the last. But at least I’m not foolishly blinded anymore. I know now that he set out to seduce me from the start, something the lot of you practice on a regular basis, so you’d be hypocrites to blame him for that. He was very subtle about it, so subtle I didn’t know what he was doing. But then I was under the misconception that he thought I was a boy, which I now know to be false. I have reason to be furious, but you don’t, since I can picture at least half of you doing exactly as James did if presented with similar circumstances. But regardless of the ways and means, I was a willing participant. I knew exactly what I was doing. My conscience can attest to that.
So our heroine acknowledges that the hero is a dickbag, but lets her family know that it’s her situation to deal with and would the men on both sides stop kidnapping her for goodness sake. And in her knowledgeable state, she decides she wants an HEA with him. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that resolution in light of the beginning, but I can say that, unlike Whitney, Georgina comes through her courtship and marriage unbroken and unbowed. Yay?
And the family dynamics of all the various brothers on both sides driving their siblings batty was fun. However, my next read will be looking at another well known family in Regency romance: Julia Quinn’s Bridgertons. I know I’ll be backtracking to more bodice rippers in the future, but for now I’m very excited to read a book from the current millennium—The Viscount Who Loved Me is my next syllabus read.
