Prudence and Property

Prudence and Property S. Humphreys

When the eccentric Dowager of Hartford Priory dies without an obvious heir, the arrival of the wealthy and reputedly disagreeable Mr. Julian Devereux sets the village of Compton Regis into a flutter of scheming and speculation. Miss Henrietta Vance alone declines to flutter.

Having watched her beloved elder sister ruined by a reckless love match, Henrietta has constructed an unshakeable philosophy: she will marry well, or not at all. Sentiment, she has firmly decided, is a luxury for women with independent fortunes. Her method is systematic. Her reasoning is sound. Her resolution is absolute.

Into this carefully ordered conviction arrives Captain Thomas Absolute - charming, penniless, and possessed of precisely the kind of easy wit that Henrietta has schooled herself to distrust. He makes her laugh. She considers this entirely irrelevant.

Mr. Devereux, meanwhile, reveals himself to be not the cold, proud man his reputation suggests, but a deeply private one - rendered cautious by past betrayal, and unexpectedly disarmed by the one woman in the neighbourhood who has never once tried to impress him. Their sparring conversations in the Priory library, their chance encounters in frost-silvered lanes, and their shared quality of honesty slowly build into something neither of them had arranged to find.

When a malicious legal challenge threatens Devereux's inheritance and the neighbourhood's fair-weather friends vanish overnight, Henrietta discovers that the truest test of her principles is not resisting feeling - but recognising, at last, which feeling is worth trusting.

Prudence and Property is a novel in the tradition of Jane Austen: sharp, warm, and quietly comic, with a heroine whose greatest obstacle is not society, nor fortune, nor even the heart - but the very intelligence she has spent two years deploying against it.

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a young lady resolute against romance is the most vulnerable to its arrival."