Miss Lockharte's Letters
By: Barbara Metzger / Narrated By: Pippa Rathborne
Length: 8 hrs and 16 mins
First Listen? Okaaaay. Second? Oh Yay! And of COURSE I listened twice!!!
ApPARently I have waaaay too much time on m’ hands if I can listen to m’ beloved Regencies twice. But ‘tain’t that at all. While I do love them (And dude! I’m beYONd feeling sheepish about the fact!), it’s mostly the Barbara Metzger/Pippa Rathborne pairing that makes their audiobooks Must Do-Agains (Tho’ Stevie Zimmerman ain’t no slouch in the narration department).
First off: What a particularly engaging premise! Genteel yet impoverished and maltreated Penmanship teacher Rosellen Lockharte is dying. In a last act of I WAS HEEEERE!!! she uses her diminishing strength to write letters to all who mistreated her and set her quite on her path to various indignities and despair at the Girls’ School she was packed off to. She spares no one; she spares them nothing. She DOES tryyyy to forgive them, but yikes! are their offenses legion and oh so scathingly enumerated, or what?!
Except for Lord Stanhope, the man who with nary a glance refused her the opportunity to leave the School to be a Companion to his little sister, thereby sending her groveling and scraping to be given a lesser position. To Stanhope? Oooooh, did I mention “scathing”? I see I did, but p’raps I should add that for Stanhope she offers no forgiveness whatsoever.
And so aaaallll her letters are sent, and she rests back upon her filthy and threadbare linen in a faraway attic to die in peace.
Oooooone itty bitsy bit o’ a problem…
She does NOT die, and there’s HELL to pay for aaaallll those letters, those words of condemnation.
It brings a plethora of as unalike individuals as it gets together, all in an effort to see if she did indeed die, p’raps make amends by putting flowers on her grave, just hoooping she doesn’t come back to haunt them forever.
The first time I listened to Miss Lockharte’s Letters, I was just a triiiiifle impatient because the setup really seemed to cover so many many bases to get it all going. But then I recalled that what I love about Metzger is that she does INDEED take her time to establish numerous plot lines that’ll farcically thread their way throughout the entirety of a very well-developed, very well-written novel. Then too, the Enemies to Lovers trope is NOT a fave of mine, esPECially when there’s the obligatory Hero shaking heroine then stooping to crush his lips against hers. I haaaate that, AND I NEVER find Force charming.
Okay, so there was that…
But with my Second Listen, I started noting how Metzger actually DID show Stanhope warming, little by little, so that his attraction to Rosellen was not sudden, and heck! we get to see just how many scrapes she gets into so that his anger actually is exasperation. Cuz I hate the whole Anger Thing as well.
Pippa, dear Pippa!!! Doesn’t matter WHAT-all Metzger writes, Rathborne voices it to perfection. In here, not only a dastardly Villain, but a wicked Villainess as well. Hear Pippa as the pair try try and try again and again to Off Rosellen, trying to make it look like a suicide. Listen to lowborn servants with hearts o’ gold, a ragtag duo of nincompoop twin brothers who fancy themselves Saviors (This after having DESTROYED her reputation in her ill-fated One and Only Season), a military gentleman who is NOT a good secretary, a lovelorn Mama and her aged Swain who may’ve just kinda sorta compromised, well, EVERYthing, and a cunning and devious and serpent-tongued cousin (To go with her perpetually aggravated papa). Lot here? You betcha, and Pippa, dear Pippa!!!
Nope, I wasn’t anywhere neeeear as peeved with the second Listen because this time I paid attention better. I mean, sometimes Metzger is like that: Soooo much going on in her stories that one does indeed lose a thread here and there. It was Me, not Her.
And it CERtainly was NOT Pippa,
…dear Pippa!!!
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