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I know it’s a crime to admit this.  Diana Campbell is a nobody; her books are out-of-print and graced with frivolous covers.  The books are not Regency historicals, but just slender little Regencies, the kind that aren’t even printed anymore.  How can Diana Campbell be my favorite, when I have Mary Balogh’s sparkling novels, Carla Kelly’s deeply emotional tales, my own former critique partner Jessica Benson’s delicious stories?  Well, partly because I discovered Diana Campbell first.  If this book cover looks tattered, it’s because I’ve read A Marriage of Inconvenience about eight times.  But it’s also because she creates the scenario that I like most to read:  a novel in which the reader waits, and waits, and waits for the two people to discover that’s they’re in love.

Diana Campbell understands the art of flirtation, of desire, of inticement.  Make no mistake: these are Regencies, and they don’t go explicitly past the bedroom door.  But she’s a master of sexual tension.  She realizes that the sexiest conversations are one in which men and women’s wit plays off each other.  Take this early argument between Lord Sheridan and Marietta (soon to be engaged in a marriage-of-convenience). 

“I suspect that love is the insidious invention of poets and novelists,” says he.  ”I certainly have not experienced any such distressing emotion during my five and thirty years.”

“Do you solicit congratulation or commiseration, milord?”

Marietta and Christopher snipe and fight and quarrel all the way through The Marriage of Inconvenience,.  Their original sparring builds the tension between them (and the reader) until you are simply longing for them to remember that they’re married, that the bedroom door is right over there, that they’re really in love with each other…

And when they finally do fall into each other’s arms, it’s enormously satisfying—not because there’s lots of descriptions of writhing limbs (these are Regencies) but because they keep talking. 

“If you were in a delicate condition, Marietta, nothing could give me great pleasure.  Permit me to rephrase tht.  Nothing could give me more happiness. I do believe there is another activity which might afford great pleasure.”

“Chistopher!” she chided.  But she was no longer discomfited:  it was right that he should want her, that she should ache with this deep, sweet longing.

I learned an enormous amount from Diana Campbell’s books—about how sexy clever conversation can be, about how delicious it is for the reader to long and long for the two characters to discover each other.  And this book blog is going up rather late because I found myself reading the book (nine times!) rather than describing it.