I'm sorry to say that this is not a good book. I would go so far as to say that it's a bad book. It is boring, bland, and void of any plot or character arc.

The book begins with a young Dorothy encouraging her sister, Hester, into going on the Dublin stage. We follow along as Hester fails and Dorothy becomes an actress in her place, is assaulted and impregnated, comes to England, engages in a long-term affair with a lawyer, falls in love with the Duke of Clarence, lives with him as his wife for twenty years, loses him, and dies alone in France.

But ... there is no story. It reads like someone took a biography and decided that it should be rewritten as vignettes with dialogue. There's no rising and falling action, there's no theme, there's no novel.

I've always been curious about Jean Plaidy, as she had a great reputation for historical fiction. I knew it was a pen name and that she had others, including Victoria Holt, but I didn't realize that she had six others as well. It seems incredible that she could write so many books a year to support all of them, but if the rest were anything like this, it's actually quite easy to believe. Each chapter is made up of several discrete scenes separated by asterisks, some of them very brief. There is occasionally a moment of interiority, but they do not connect into actual interior lives for any of the characters. Her reputation was, I think, made on the basis of her historical accuracy, which is a lot like Georgette Heyer's: shallow, based on including facts that are correct. Characters don't have to really consider their actions, they do what they do because the biographies Plaidy consulted said that's what they did.

The most annoying thing is that there are flashes of things that could be very interesting novels if written by someone who had any interest in writing a story and exploring what it actually would have been like to be in these situations. The most intriguing character is Dorothy's eldest daughter, Fanny. She is the product of rape, but Dorothy is determined to love her anyway; the only father she ever knows, Dorothy's first lover, shuns her in favor of his own daughters with her mother; after Dorothy takes up with Prince William, she and her half-sisters have to live apart from their mother so that she can devote herself to him and their new half-siblings; she marries a man who is eventually so abusive to her that she takes laudanum to cope. And the book is so unsympathetic to her. The crime of her conception isn't just a problem within the world of the novel, but to the writer, it seems, as she's frequently described as being resentful and unpleasant. Near the end, Dorothy wishes she would go to India after her husband ... you mean the one who treats her so badly? You would rather your daughter be abused than annoying to you? Likewise, there could be so much tension in the fact that Dorothy abandons her children in service of her pseudo-husband, who finds hearing about them unpleasant and utterly fails to help them with dowries even though he'd pledged to and even though the reason Dorothy can't pay for them is because he drains her money. Instead of this creating complexity, it's just that sometimes Dorothy is happy and sometimes she's sad, sometimes William is a nice man and sometimes he's a total jerk.