This is a cute little story, about a bunch of rich people in Victorian England. There is Mr and Mrs Douglas and their two daughters, which family is not quite as rich as neighbors, Lord and Lady Eskdale, and their four children. Mrs Douglas is a sour grapes-sort of person, but it all comes out Happy in the end. Not a very realistic book, but still fairly enjoyable. ( )

I don't know how I haven't heard of EE before; she's really the next best thing when accepting the tragedy of Jane Austen not writing more books.

Elizabeth Klett's Librivox recording is also VERY good. ( )

After a brief, ballroom-acquaintance courtship, the beautiful young Lady Helen Eskdale becomes engaged to marital prize, Lord Teviot. Almost immediately, Helen begins to have doubts; but with two older sisters happily married on equally brief acquaintance and a mother serenely making wedding-plans, she struggles to articulate them, and the marriage goes ahead. Passionately in love with Helen, Teviot is hurt by her emotional reticence, and increasingly jealous of what seems to him a preference for her family's company over her husband's; and it is not long before an estrangement develops... Written in 1830, but not published for another thirty years, Emily Eden's The Semi-Attached Couple is a social comedy with a serious point. Not surprisingly for a first attempt at a novel (moreover, it seems that Eden did not revise her manuscript before eventually publishing it), this is an uneven work, whose shifts in tone do not always meld well. There is much overt comedy, most of it involving two awful supporting characters: Mrs Douglas, whose greatest pleasure in life is being miserable; and Lady Portmore, a social manoeuvrer suffering delusions of self-importance; the clashes between the two comprise some of the novel's funniest scenes. Emily Eden was a great admirer of Jane Austen, and it shows in a series of tart conversation set-pieces, between the mutually antagonistic ladies, and between Mrs Douglas and her long-suffering husband. But at the same time, Eden takes Helen, and her situation, perfectly seriously; and while she does poke some fun at Teviot's "superior male" attitudes and self-defeating jealousy (showing that he is, in his own way, almost as naive as Helen, and much more foolish), in the end she can only resolve her central dilemma by twisting her comedy into a near-tragedy, and tacking a conventional conclusion onto what is, in many ways, an unconventional novel. Despite these flaws, The Semi-Attached Couple is an unusual and entertaining work, offering an engaging picture of society between the Regency period and the Victorian era. It is also quite psychologically acute, particularly in its depiction of the way that Teviot's jealousy creates a self-fulfilling tragedy, by driving Helen away and therefore "proving" his worst fears. Moreover, Eden shows, as plainly as was permissible at the time, that to a girl of Helen's age and innocence, Teviot's very passion for her is more frightening than gratifying. Interestingly, Eden places great weight upon the disparate family situations of her central couple: Teviot is an only child, with a poor relationship with his father, and consequently has no experience and little understanding of Helen's deep attachment to her large, happy family; while Helen, conversely, has no experience of the world beyond family life, and cannot easily give it up. By dissecting the increasing estrangement between the two, and by placing around them several contrasting relationships, Eden offers valid criticism of the way marriages were made at the time, and the unrealistic expectations placed upon young and inexperienced women.

     Helen found every day some fresh cause to doubt whether she were as happy, engaged to Lord Teviot, as she was before she had ever seen him. He was always quarrelling with her---at least, so she thought; but the real truth was, that he was desperately in love, and she was not; that he was a man of strong feelings and exacting habits, and with considerable knowledge of the world; and that she was timid and gentle, unused to any violence of manner or language, and unequal to cope with it. He alarmed her, first by the eagerness with which he poured out his affection, and then by the bitterness of his reproaches because, as he averred, it was not returned.
    She tried to satisfy him; but when he had frightened away her playfulness, he had deprived her of her greatest charm, and she herself felt that her manner became daily colder and more repulsive. His prediction that she would be happier anywhere than with him seemed likely, by repetition, to insure its own fulfillment. Even their reconciliations---for what is the use of a quarrel but to bring on a reconciliation?---were unsatisfactory. She wished that he loved her less, or would say less about it; and he thought that the gentle willingness with which she met his excuses was only a fresh proof that his love or his anger were equally matters of indifference to her. No French actor with a broken voice, quivering hands, a stride, and a shrug, could have given half the emphasis to the sentiment, J'aimerais mieux être haï qu' aimé faiblement, than Lord Teviot did to the upbraidings with which he diversified the monotony of love-making...

I thoroughly enjoyed this read, a book I found through Reflections review of the same book. It's very Austen-esque in tone and wit, but the story itself starts where most others leave off: with the wedding and the aftermath: two people who do not know each other at all, trying to be husband and wife.

I knocked half a star off because I struggled quite a bit with the two main characters, Teviot and his bride Helen. The reader never meets them before the wedding as individuals and for most of the book one is left to know them only through their reactions to each other. This feels unsatisfactory, because the whole premise of the story is the misunderstandings that take place when two strangers marry and try to live with each other. Not having any idea of the normal character of each, I never quite knew who was being unreasonable or misreading signals.

This isn't the case with the rest of the cast: each of the supporting characters thoroughly came alive for me, even down to Helen's maid, who had the fewest number of scenes. Helen and Teviot aren't the only ones having a hard time with romance and interpersonal relationships either.

Helen and Teviot came together for me about 2/3s of the way through the book when circumstances force them apart and they have to deal directly with each other without interference; the story gets a bit sappy here, but by this time I was so invested in the outcome it didn't bother me.

Jane Austen fans would enjoy this one quite a bit, I think, and I plan on recommending it to a couple of RL people I know who have worn out their copies of Austen's books and would enjoy something "new". ( )

Victorian author Emily Eden admired Jane Austen--and it shows in her astute and witty prose which delighted this Janite--but she begins her book where Jane’s stories end, with a wedding. Lovely Helen has all the ingredients for 19th century happiness. She’s beloved by her large well-off family and she’s about to marry wealthy Lord Teviot, who charmed her when they danced together. But being good Victorians they haven’t actually spent much time alone, and when she is whisked away after the ceremony she suddenly realises she doesn’t know or understand Teviot very well and she’s decidedly homesick, damaging her relationship with her proper but ardent new husband. Among other things the story becomes a post-wedding courtship with lots of twists and turns, ups and downs.

Like Austen’s novels The Semi-attached Couple is filled with amusing characters and there are at least three romances that develop during the course of the plot. It took me a little while to get all the names and characters straight--there is a Lord Beaufort and a Colonel Beaufort for instance--but somewhere along the way this book became one I couldn’t put down. First I simply found it divertingly funny, with characters to laugh at and enjoy loving or hating, but as the story went on it also became exciting, then moving, until finally at the end it was deeply satisfying. ( )