Marrying Winterborne

Marrying Winterborne is the second book in Lisa Kleypas’s Ravenels series, the Victorian historical romance saga that started with Cold Hearted Rake in 2015. The series follows the Ravenel family, a group of distant relatives who unexpectedly inherit an aristocratic title and estate after the deaths of the previous earls, and each book in the series focuses on one Ravenel finding their love story alongside the wider family drama.

This novel belongs to Helen Ravenel, the gentle and bookish older sister who in the previous book had become engaged to Rhys Winterborne, the wealthy Welsh self made man whose department store empire is one of the dominant retail businesses in Victorian London. The first book ended with Rhys breaking the engagement after a misunderstanding made him believe Helen was being forced into the match against her will. Marrying Winterborne picks up shortly after, with Helen taking matters into her own hands. She visits Rhys at his bachelor flat, uninvited, and tells him that she is going to be his whether he likes it or not. The second half of the novel works through the slow process of these two very different people figuring out how a marriage between them can actually function.

Lisa Kleypas writes the kind of historical romance that combines real period detail with the emotional satisfaction of the genre at its best. Helen is one of her quieter heroines, with a determined steel underneath the gentle surface, and Rhys is one of her most distinctive heroes. Welsh, working class by origin, brilliant, ruthless in business, and almost completely unprepared for the kind of intimacy that an actual marriage to Helen will require. The class and cultural differences between them are taken seriously rather than just used as romance friction, and Kleypas earns the relationship through the patient work she does across the page count.

For longtime Kleypas fans, Marrying Winterborne is one of the strongest entries in the Ravenels series. For new readers, the series rewards being read in order starting with Cold Hearted Rake, but Marrying Winterborne can be picked up as a standalone with some loss of context.