To Pleasure a Duke by Sara Bennett

Grade: C-

passion rating: warm

When I was growing up, “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” was regularly put forth as an argument against premarital sex. This awful phrase has been appearing in English literature since the 17th century. For hundreds of years, those words have described men who want the wanton bang without the wedding bling. These twelve words and the dilemma they describe sum up much of Ms. Bennett’s latest novel To Pleasure a Duke.

Miss Eugenie Belmont belongs, along with several other young women, to the Husband Hunters Club, a group of marriage minded graduates from Miss. Debenhams’s Finishing School. The husband she tells her friends she’s hunting — initially it’s a ruse on her part — is the uber pompous Sinclair St. John, the Duke of Somerton. Somerton, often called the most eligible bachelor in the country, is her neighbor back at home in Gloucestershire and her family is vastly socially inferior to his. The Belmonts are a ramshackle bunch. Eugenie’s father is a trickster; her mother, a flighty emotional ditherer. Her twin brothers are always in trouble; her brother Terry has taken up gambling and speaking rudely. Only her animal whispering younger brother Jack does anything to help Eugenie keep the family on track. The titled Somertons hold not only the Belmonts but virtually every family in England — and thus the world — beneath their notice. They are the cream of the ton and Sinclair, his sister Annabelle, and their mother (the dowager duchess) are utter snobs.


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