Master of the Moor

Lord Mallon de Wolfe, viscount of Wulverton Hall, is going home. Although he has been gone for over 20 years, his heart has found no other place to call home.  Growing up without a mother to love him, and never knowing his own father’s love, Lord Mallon found comfort in the moors and its people.  His father’s death sparked an urgency to find himself in the only place he truly loves.  Countess Genevieve of Chateau Rosseline, dutiful widow and erstwhile lady-in-waiting, is leaving the only place she had ever truly loved: Chateau Rosseline.  It reminded her how far she’d come, what she had done and who she had forgotten, to achieve it.  To guarantee no one would ever threaten to take it, she must leave it and bewitch the handsome young heir to her dead husband’s fortunes.

Ms. De Maupassant’s “Master of the Moor” is a British high-society romantic novel set in the 1900’s. Her protagonists dance and dodge each other in a seductive game of cat and mouse. Testing each other’s wits, they dare each other to cross the line from lust to love, only to end up fighting their own demons of insecurity, jealousy, and the fear of loss and heartbreak. Ms. De Maupassant does a fine job weaving social mores of the time into the narrative, reminding the reader that although women were not considered equals, they were nonetheless adept at balancing the scales one way or another.  Although highly formulaic and predictable, her characters are so well developed with generous portions of spontaneity, that all true romance fans will swoon over its conclusion, just for the joy of reading it again.

Kimberly Gunvaldson