Spring Muslin is one of my favorite Georgette Heyer Regency Romances. I'm pleased to say that Sian Phillips was an excellent narrator for this book. ( )

I started this as I wanted a book to read in the bath after the successful conclusion of operation clear the shed. I ended up turning the light out after I'd finished it. Excellent. One of Heyer's romances that actually had me uncertain which of the female leads our hero would end up with, the one he should, or the one wit hthe obvious charms.
Spoiler ridden review follows.
We meet our hero first, Gareth appears to have ti all, apart from his fiance who broke her neck in a carriage accident some 7 years ago. He now decides that as the sole remaining son of the family, he needs to marry & continue the family line. So he decides to offer for Hester, who has long been considered by her family to be left on the shelf and should leap at the match. It's not a love match, on his side, he just thinks that they might rub along. Along the way, Garth comes across Amanda, a youthful 17 in a flowered muslin dress who is trying to escape her grandfather in order to demonstrate that she is able to take care of herself in order to marry an officer of the Peninsular army. And so she is, to a certain extent, but not really. The first time Gareth rescues her, he ends up arriving at Hester's family's house with Amanda, and dumps her upon Hester just before making his offer. Amanda is everything that Hester is not, young, vivacious, beautiful and, to Hester, has an air of the lost fiance. So everyone wonders what on earth Gareth is doing bringing his bit on the side to propose to Hester, although there remains surprise that Hester declines him. Amanda determines to escape Gareth and so sets off with Hester's elderly debauched uncle and then finds that she;s misjudged him and escapes him as well. Gareth spends a lot of time chasing after Amanda, only to get wrapped up in one final scheme to escape him and ends up shot. And so Amanda calls Hester to nurse Gareth and from here you feel more sure which way this is going to go. The final scenes rely on the families of both Hester & Amanda arriving almost at once and demanding that he marry in order to repair the damage to their reputation. Fortunately, Gareth is made of sterner stuff and so we end up with the right couples paired off, for the right reasons. This one had me worried, Amanda's obvious charms win everyone over, but her heart is already spoken for, would Gareth fall prey?
To add to the appeal, I live in one of the towns mentioned, so I knew where they were and which routes they were taking (generally the old road, the A14 not having been invented!) ( )

Finding so young and pretty a girl as Amanda wandering unattended, Sir Gareth Ludlow knows it is his duty as a man of honour to restore her to her family. But it is to prove no easy task for the Corinthian. His captive in spring muslin has more than her rapturous good looks and bandboxes to aid her - she is also possessed of a runaway imagination... A typically enthralling historical novel, Sprig Muslin shows the skill which has kept Georgette Heyer a huge and devoted readership to this day. ( )

Amanda is an exhausting character... I have never been so tired in trying to identify with a character's guardian before. ( )

Heyer is one of my favorite authors. However, I have to give Sprig Muslin a reluctant thumbs down. I liked Sir Gareth but, Lady Hester, only mildly, as she was limp and undeveloped. I had better hopes of her being more like Jenny, from A Civil Contract. Another character, Amanda, a silly young runaway who Sir Gareth endeavors to rescue, was quite annoying and exasperating. Unfortunately, Sir Gareth meets up with her at Chapter 3, and she become the main focus of the rest of this story, while his connection with love interest Lady Hester is suspended and hardly developed at all. I was bored with the tiring plot of Amanda's escapes and Sir Gareth's pursuit, thus I skipped ahead while in the middle of chapter 12. Chapter 15 until the end was tolerable enough, Lady Hester appears again, but the ending was rushed into a quick and unsatisfying haphazard resolution. Quite disappointing. I know I'll read better works of hers, this wasn't one of them. ( )