If you like your heroines very young, a little stupid, extremely innocent and more virginal than Mother Mary, I’ve got the perfect book for you. Mona Prevel’s Educating Emily is the first book I’ve ever read to contain a heroine who freaks out when her husband kisses her on their wedding night, believing he has committed a grave violation of her honor and all proper sentiments. Poor Emily. Poor hubby.

Young Emily Walsingham has had a lovely come out Season up until it became known that her brother Miles had gambled her dowry away. Miles has promised her as a bride to Lord Ruysdale, a revolting old libertine, and in her desperation she runs away disguised as a maid. She encounters a couple of thugs and is rescued by James Garwood, the Marquess of Northwycke, who hires her as a maid. James’s mother Geraldine recognizes her and wants Emily and James to be married.

The path to consummation is wrought with difficulties. Emily believes James is in love with her but she has been raised in complete ignorance about a woman’s marital duties and she’s appalled when James attempts to kiss her. The dowager marchioness does not greatly ameliorate matters when she informs Emily that a gentlewoman should never let her husband observe her base sexual impulses lest he commit her into a mental asylum. James thinks he’s in lust and can’t understand his wife’s passivity in bed. Thus both James and Emily are doomed to experience frustrated desire, although we can’t blame James for lack of trying.

Further strain on their relationship is produced by James’s former mistress Althea (read: the evil ex from Cliché-land) who confronts Emily in a party and tells her James is deeply in love with his mistress and flaunts in her face a pair of sapphire earrings he gave her. Emily is upset, and James shows himself in a doltish light for not understanding why Emily is upset.

As if unsatisfying sex lives weren’t enough suffering, someone keeps getting their maids in the family way. Lord Ruysdale, his grandson, and Althea make nefarious plans. There’s a skirmish and a duel. James founds a charitable institution. Miles falls unsuitably in love. A family secret is uncovered. There’s too much going on for such a short book and none of the threads seem to connect. All this intrigue leaves too little room for the relationship to develop. I never felt I knew what the lovers were going through, although their dallying was entertaining to watch from a distance.

However, I liked the melodramatic beginning and some of Ms. Prevel’s writing. I might be tempted to check out another book by her if someone could assure me the heroines aren’t all this prudish. Give me a sequel for James and Emily, set about ten to twenty years later, when Emily has grown up to a more mature age. I have little patience for innocent, ignorant little misses but if they’re to your taste you might easily like this book a lot more than I did.