HLS Grad Explores Old English Spies, Subterfuge, and Sex

The prologue of Lauren Willig’s “The Deception of the Emerald Ring” is promising. Grandma is playing matchmaker for Harvard history graduate student Eloise Kelly, the novel’s intermittent first-person narrator.

“‘Andy,’ declared Grandma, in the ringing tones of a CNN correspondent delivering election results, ‘works at Lehman Brothers.’”

Eloise replies with an Austenian rejoinder: “And Bingley has five thousand pounds a year.”

This opening dialogue offers the potential for an insightful critique of the societal tendency to conflate persons and property. Unfortunately, instead of developing this theme (not so foreign to the aspiring i-banker set), the novel descends into hackneyed tropes of the romance genre. This third installment of Willig’s “Pink Carnation” series is ultimately concerned with providing the reader vicarious erotic gratification.

Framed by Eloise’s modern-day dissertation research into the “Pink Carnation” and “League of the Purple Gentian”—British espionage organizations meant to quash Irish insurrection in 1803—the narrative centers on Letty Alsworthy, the newlywed of Purple Gentian officer Geoff Pinchingdale-Snipe.

In a nicely rendered comedy of errors, Letty—who tries to prevent her sister Mary from eloping with Geoff—is thrust into the carriage intended for Mary’s midnight escape. “Compromised” by having been seen abroad with Geoff, Letty is encouraged by her parents to marry him. Mr. and Mrs. Alsworthy, who are thinly veiled copies of Jane Austen’s Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, have a clear financial interest in their daughter’s marriage:

“‘My daughter,’ [Mrs. Alsworthy] sighed on a wave of maternal pride. ‘A viscountess!’”

Mr. Alsworthy’s sage advice to Letty for “navigating the shoals of matrimony”—“invest in a subscription to the circulating library and a stout pair of earplugs.”

Traveling to Dublin, where she believes her renegade husband to have retreated after their shotgun wedding, Letty finds herself enmeshed in a world of subterfuge and shifting aliases. As Letty stumbles blindly through the dark warrens of Dublin’s crypts and other rebel depots, I was not able to deduce any sort of internal logic to her rambling experiences.

That is until I recognized that the bewildering political maneuverings are simply a cardboard backdrop for Letty’s quest for erotic gratification. This ugly duckling will have her tryst. She will find Love. She will learn that she is “Sensual. Seductive. Desirable.”

This quest is intermittently retarded by Eloise’s invasive narration. Every few chapters, we are brought back to contemporary London and treated to Eloise’s scintillating updates on her research progress, as well as her continued lusting after charming British bloke, Colin Selwick. Substitute “Firth” for “Selwick,” and you have an idea of how this plot too will develop.

It is through Eloise’s narration that Willig, a graduate of Harvard Law School, reminds us of her own pedigree. The description is often cutely evocative—“I missed the rutted brick streets of Harvard Square, where my heels stuck between the stones and my boots slid out from under me in slushy weather.” Or sometimes playfully displays a sense of self-reflexive Harvardian irony—“Next to me, I could hear orange blazer man drawling, ‘An ironic reconstruction of an iconic representation…’ All the I’s and R’s blurred in my ears into one general buzz.”

“The Deception of the Emerald Ring” betrays its author’s ability to write intelligent witticisms. I can only hope that Willig’s future fiction endeavors will have less slush to slide through.

The Deception of the Emerald Ring
By Lauren Willig
Dutton Adult
Out Nov. 16, 2006