This is a transcendent Regency romance that goes far beyond the usual limits of its genre to combine a sparkling comedy of manners with a drama of complex, believable human emotions. With subtle humor, unerring taste, and exceptional elegance, Joy Freemen portrays the characteristically troubled but always amusing courtship of Sherworth, a rakish earl sworn to bachelorhood (but hardly celibacy), and Vescinda Bancroft, a girl of beauty, good birth, and good sense who seems doomed by unlucky circumstances to spinsterhood