Red as a Rose Is She: A Novel

Rhoda Broughton's 1870 novel opens in a Welsh valley with Esther Craven, a young woman whose sharp tongue and fierce independence have already earned her a reputation. When local suitor Robert Brandon proposes, Esther's response is neither flattered nor conventional: she laughs in his face, then retreats to the company of her beloved brother Jack, whose easy affection she craves far more than any romantic entanglement. But Broughton is too clever to let her heroine simply refuse the dance. As Esther navigates the small cruelties and hypocrisies of provincial Victorian life, she discovers that independence has its own loneliness, and that refusing to be a rose might mean never being seen at all. The novel crackles with witty dialogue and social observation, but its true power lies in its quiet ache: the tension between wanting to be loved and refusing to perform the role love traditionally demands. Broughton, writing at only twenty-three, delivers a heroine who is infuriating, relatable, and thoroughly modern in her contradictions.