Julia Roseingrave - Marjorie Bowen writing as Robert Paye

I've been on holiday for a week and struggled to read much while I was away. That turned out to be partly because the prescription for my new glasses isn't very good - three times they've had to be sent back for re-adjustment, and they're still blurring things around the edges. It's headache inducing, and annoying because each set of adjustments seems to have made the issue worse and now I think I just need to go to another optician.

It's been a few weeks then since I read Julia Roseingrave - a deeply silly book that was tremendous fun. I think it's set some time in the reign of Charles II - or thereabouts but it doesn't matter very much. One moonlit night a traveler who appears to be the devil arrives at Holcot Grange claiming he is it's owner. The Grange is meant to have some sort of curse on it so the owners have been absent for some long time. The house keeper reluctantly admits the stranger and then seeks the advice of the nearest thing to an educated neighbour she has. 

Julia Roseingrave is a youngish woman (late 20s) very beautiful, who lives with her paralised mother and a sister with learning difficulties. She's a distant relative of the master of the Grange and agrees to come and see what's going on. She determines that the devil guise is nothing but fancy dress and hatches a plan to escape her life of rural seclusion by marrying the young man.

He's easily enthralled and makes even easier promises - but can he keep them? No, he can't, because he's already married, his wife turns up and Julia gets desperate. And this is where it gets interesting. She's been consorting with a  local wise woman and has plans to dispose of unwanted wives so we go from Julia being ambitious but sympathetic, to full on villainous mode, and then there's a final twist and nothing was clear anymore. 

I'd say this, and its accompanying short stories are more curiosity than anything else - the style is somewhat overblown, but both Julia Roseingrave as the main story and the other sorts included are worth the time to read and think about. there's some interesting messages there from the 1930s and if it's all a bit much at times, it's also always fun.