Both sweet and romantic, this novela manages to handle an A plot about the transit of Venus and B plot about a breech baby. Miss Rose Sweetly likes Stephen Shaughnessy, but doesn't trust him, or take him seriously. She's looking for a man who can handle marrying a black woman in Victorian England. Also she wants to do astronomical calculations. Shaughnessy seems to want to scandalize people, and she's pretty sure he doesn't grok how much her association with him imperils her, and he hasn't mentioned marriage, but if he did, does he really get what he's signing up for?

(By the end: yes.)

(Milan includes in her afterword: "By 1882, Britain had probably trained at least as many black doctors as there were dukes," which seems to be a pretty direct response to a very common line of criticism, and cracked me up a little.)