Customer Reviews

A Lady of Quality

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Despite the title, this is not a frothy tale of lords and ladies. The heroine is an almost mythic character with the physical strength and beauty of Diana the Huntress and the will of a despot.

Clorinda and her sisters have lost their mother and are ignored by their father, a handsome brute who spends his days hunting and his nights drinking with crude companions. Clorinda's sisters are plain and meek, but she is a stunning hellion who at six years old rides horseback as well as a grown man. One day she wanders into the forbidden quarters of her father, and he's totally entranced by her beauty and fiery temper, so much like his own.

He often dresses her like a boy, and she drinks and swears along with him and his cohorts. Then at age fifteen, she decides it's time to become a genteel woman and acquire a man of rank and property for a husband. She becomes a self-made lady of quality, with a wardrobe and manners befitting her birthright.

The first half of the book is the best, to my mind. We watch Clorinda escape female stereotypes, then shake the evil influences of her upbringing and learn how to thrive, and even do good, in society. As the story progresses, melodrama takes over.

Clorinda creates her own image and manipulates public opinion with astonishing skill. Perhaps she's a wish-fulfillment figure for her author. Frances Hodgson Burnett spent her later years secluded from critics and gossips who disapproved of her private life and her independent ways.

A Lady of Quality was published in 1896. It's not a perfect book, but well worth reading if you're interested in the fascinating career of Frances Hodgson Burnett.