A Lady’s Guide to Scandal by Sophie Irwin

Read: March 2025
Format: eBook

I read A Lady’s Guide to Fortune-Hunting in 2023 and quite liked it. It was flawed but had enough interesting elements that I was game to try Sophie Irwin’s follow-up novel. In that one, I really liked the main character but found the romance oddly flat and lacking any passion, and the love interest was very bland. Unfortunately, I found A Lady’s Guide to Scandal had all the weaknesses of the previous book without any of its strengths.

I’ll also start by saying that for some reason I did not clock that this was going to be a love triangle book! It is right there on the cover so I don’t know how I missed it, but missed it I did! I thought it was going to be more of a Persuasion style lost-love kind of plot, but once Melville entered the scene it was clear that wasn’t what we were going to be doing!

At the start, Eliza had my sympathies and I really thought I was going to like her. We learn she turned down the proposal of Lord Somerset, the man she loved, to marry his Uncle out of duty to her family. Now he’s dead and he’s left her his fortune, a last-minute change to his will made out of spite for the family, not for the love of Eliza, but the catch is a morality clause to be judged by the very Lord Somerset she turned down all those years ago. I thought I’d enjoy Eliza’s journey of self-growth now she is free and independently wealthy… but I quickly found myself frustrated by her.

I feel like this morality clause would not be that difficult to stick to, especially when it is arbitrated by a man you know has fond feelings for you! But Eliza makes incomprehensibly stupid decisions again and again and again. She immediately starts hanging out with the scandalous Melville siblings, she hosts parties which aren’t the done thing when in the morning period, she drives a phaeton around town (basically the carriage equivalent of a sports car), she goes to a masquerade ball. Ok, maybe she’s enjoying this new life of freedom after being cooped up for so long, but she just does it all in the most public and obvious way without trying to cover her tracks!

I might have been on board with this if her character had been better written. She seems to go from a duty-bound good girl to a wild child on the flip of a coin. I didn’t think there was enough of an on-ramp to this, there was not enough of her personality before, her experience and feelings (like her longing for creative fulfilment, what were her internal struggles before?) from her time in her marriage to justify what feels like a sudden change.

The relationship with Lord Somerset is another key element that didn’t work. She goes on about how in love with him she is, they were a great love cruelly torn apart by her family making her marry his uncle. How tragic! This love is never demonstrated or explored in a meaningful way. From what I could tell they met one night, had a nice dance and a chat, he proposed but his Uncle had already got to her family and that was that. She married the Uncle and he went off with the army (or the navy, can’t remember). It really sounded like they barely knew each other, and the Reader doesn’t get to know him either! How are we supposed to believe this was love?

Then there is Lord Melville who is dashing and exotic, the opposite of Somerset. He’s kind of a Lord Byron type – a writer, with a scandalous reputation, a cheeky sense of humour etc. He is fine I suppose, but there was something very lacking in the way the romance was written. This was a problem I also had in A Lady’s Guide to Fortune-Hunting, Sophie Irwin doesn’t seem to be able to write chemistry, there was no spark. Their romance goes from Erica just thinking it’s friendship to all of a sudden “oh, I like him”, I just didn’t feel this transition (despite it being bloody obvious it was going to happen).

There is also a tacked-on LGBT romance happening in the background (as in A Lady’s Guide to Fortune-Hunting the side characters are off having a more interesting time!) that felt ridiculously unrealistic for the period, including Eliza’s ridiculously chill reaction to it.

The main issue though is that I just didn’t like Eliza and I didn’t root for her. In fact, I actually wanted her to lose her fortune and end up with no man, it’s what she deserved for all her childish behaviour!

I don’t think I’ll be reading any more Sophie Irwin.