Worth Any Price Book

I truly wish Mary Cholmondeley had given this book another name. It might have enticed more people to read it now, when the phrase "red pottage" has literally no meaning to our society, and it is a book that well-deserves to be read.

I became completely engrossed in these characters and the moral quagmire of their time. Talk about a cross-section of society, we have the very wealthy and shallow, the very wealthy and titled, the rather poor and ordinary, the rather poor but exceptional, the finest kind of moral beacon in the guise of a bishop, and the very worst of a sniveling, narrow-mindedness in a clergyman. In truth, Cholmondeley makes it clear that where you are born or what profession you choose is not what determines your value in the least.

I felt the punishment did not fit the crime in the case of Hugh Scarlet. He is guilty of cuckolding a gentleman and, in the days when a duel was a matter of honor, he is called to a duel of a kind, but in my view much worse. In a book that is replete with the need for redemption, he desperately tries to find his so that he can measure up to Rachel West, the woman he comes to love. What I found especially moving is that Rachel, while a very decent person, is not a paragon of virtue herself, as she judges men too harshly based on one past experience.

In a parallel story, we become acquainted with Hester Gresley, Rachel's best friend, and a woman who has her own crosses to bear. She is a spinster living with her brother, a low-ranking clergyman. This pious pontificator made my blood boil. He is everything that causes people to question religion and its worth and the kind of man whose example might well push anyone farther from God if they considered for one instance that he might be God's chosen representative. Hester, of course, is kinder in her thought of him than I am, but I am proved right.

In fact there are a few characters who cannot be loved, they are just too horrid, but the three main characters are unerringly human and I felt greatly for each of them. Cholmondeley addresses many important themes in this work, not the least of them being the position of unmarried women in society and the struggle for independence they are forced to constantly battle. I felt her writing was reminiscent of George Eliot...and I do not compare anyone to George Eliot lightly.

If you have not read this book, and you have any affinity for 19th Century classics, please do yourself the favor of putting it on your TBR toward the top.