Book Review - Julia Quinn's To Sir Phillip, With Love
Published by: Avon
Publication Date: July 1st, 2003
Format: Paperback, 400 Pages
Rating: ★★★
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Eloise loves to receive letters. She is smart enough to know that in order to receive one must give. So she's always jotting off notes to friends and family. Her hands are perpetually covered in ink as the words flow unimpeded from her hand much as they do from her mouth. Conversation and discussion are her very lifeblood. Therefore taking up a correspondence with her distant cousin Marina's widower after Marina's passing isn't that untoward. The importance Sir Phillip Crane's letters become in her life is surprising. And then he offers to marry her. He doesn't say it's because he just wants to have a happy wife and someone to look after his kids while he putters about in his greenhouse. He just assumes that Eloise still being unwed she would naturally want to avoid being a spinster and offers for her. With conditions, because he doesn't expect a woman from London to come to the wilds of Gloucestershire and marry him sight unseen. He suggests he has a chaperone come to Romney Hall and accompany her for a few weeks to see if they will suit. But then Eloise's brother marries her best friend and her world is turned upside down. So instead of writing to Sir Phillip that she is coming she just arrives on his doorstep. And neither is what the other expected. Sir Phillip thought he'd meet a demure spinster, instead he meets the woman of his dreams, until she opens her mouth and starts talking a mile a minute. This is definitely a woman who hasn't lacked suitors, in fact she's turned down more than a handful of them. Eloise knew nothing of his children, the terrors of the county, but thankfully she has so many nieces and nephews she knows how to handle children. Even if they decide to wage war on her the second they see her. But the main problem is her showing up unannounced means there's no chaperone. Every minute she stays Eloise is risking her and Sir Phillip being wed whether they wish it or not. And there is hope they will suit. Eloise is good with the kids, he is good with the kissing. But once her family descends on them... Well, things rapidly get out of hand. Especially as they assumed she had been kidnapped. Eloise did leave a note. She always does! She just didn't think it would be misplaced and the chaos that was enveloping her life would spread. But maybe things will all work out. Maybe.
Eloise's story is part The Parent Trap part Jane Eyre. It's occasionally cringeworthy, funny, horrifying, boring, and sexy with everyone getting their happily ever after except Marina. And that is my problem with To Sir Phillip, With Love, Marina, AKA Bertha by another name. She was a very sad and depressed woman who took her life. Yet she is little more than just a plot device to bring Eloise and Phillip together and because of that she lacks a voice. She isn't understood. She is handled almost callously. She was depressed and now she's gone so let's move on. There was a part of me that was crying out for her to have her own Wide Sargasso Sea moment. I wanted to see what happened to her through her eyes, not those of a detached male. The problem for me then becomes rooted in a conundrum; do I want the characters to handle mental illness as it was viewed then or as it was viewed when this book first came out. And added to that is how much mental health has even changed in the almost twenty years since this book was released. Mental illness historically wasn't well treated, just look what England did to their own King. So at least Marina wasn't in an asylum. Which means the real problem I have is with Phillip, who just seemed to give up. Fans of his, and I don't know who you are, would say, oh, but he jumped into the lake to save her, and what about when he vents to Eloise in front of Marina's portrait of all he claims to have done. I say too little too late. Julia Quinn was trying to walk back the insensitivity of a man who is all about himself. Yes, maybe Marina was so depressed nothing Phillip could have done would have helped her. But I see a man who locked himself in a greenhouse and shut out the world instead of trying to face what he didn't want to face. Personally I think my husband just leaving me in a room with the curtains drawn while he's more concerned about his plants would make me depressed too! What's more he ignores his children, not even knowing they are being abused, because again, he doesn't want to deal with that. And then he's so self-centered he plans to marry to have a happy wife who will take care of everything he doesn't want to deal with. And as for the criteria of a "happy" wife? That is horrible and putting a heck of a lot of pressure on your spouse. They MUST be happy! But all's well, because Eloise is happy and Marina is written off as someone who was sad her whole life so Phillip gets what Phillip wants. Phillip is an ass. And yet still not nearly as annoying as Benedict.
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