THE SPANISH BRIDE is not your typical regency romance. For one thing, the marriage that usually culminates a courtship comes near the beginning of the novel, so there is no arc of tension about this relationship. The other feature of this volume is that it deals with the gritty reality of warfare, at a time when the British were engaged in a dogged dragged-out fight to remove the French from the Iberian Peninsula.
In short, THE SPANISH BRIDE is based upon a true story. When Captain Harry Smith meets a Spanish lady in distress, he immediately decides to marry her. His friends are dismayed, for Captain Harry, at the age of twenty-five, is a rising star in the officer corps, and his friends believe that a wife will hinder his progress.
Then there is the matter of the lady in question. For Juana María de los Dolores de León, a descendant of Juan Ponce de León, is of the Hildago class, meaning that she is an aristocrat. What will her family think of her marrying one of those godless English protestants? At the age of only fourteen, she would have to abide by her father’s wishes.
But this is 1812, and we are in the middle of the Peninsular war. Juana has no relatives left and is in certain danger of being harmed, maybe even killed, as the out-of-control men of the British army (who have not been paid for months) rampage through the town of Badajos. And so, Juana and her only remaining relative – an older sister – throw themselves on the mercy of some British officers. One of them, Captain Harry Smith, falls head-over-heels with the sparkling Juana. And because it is not seemly to have an aristocratic fourteen-year-old girl as a camp follower, he decides to marry her. Juana is such a charmer that even Lord Wellington himself offers to give her away at the wedding!
And so the novel begins. Marches, counter-marches, sieges, hunger, dysentery and all the other sordid realties of life that happen when tens of thousands of men march hundreds of miles in all kinds of weather can seem like boring fare for aficionados of regency romance.. But Georgette Heyer is such a talented author that her wonderful characters and amazing descriptions hold this novel together. My favorite piece of the novel that wasn’t connected to Harry and Juana’s romance was about the fight in the Pyrenees as the British army methodically drove the French back into France. I’ll never forget her descriptions of the exhaustion of the men, and how they nevertheless managed to charge up steep inclines to dislodge the French.
If you are looking for something different in regency romance novels, this one is for you! Five stars.
