To Sir Phillip With Love by Julia Quinn

I am gradually working my way through the Bridgerton ouevre and this is Eloise's story--she is my favorite of the siblings (which is not so fair to Hyacinth and Gregory as they are just children in the Netflix adaptation that I have watched to date). She waves off all suitors and is settled into her role as a spinster at the ripe old age of 28, in part because her closest friend is in her shoes. Then suddenly that all changes when Penelope quite suddenly gets married, and to her brother Colin, no less. On top of that it is revealed that she has been Lady Whistledown the whole time, and lo and behold, it is done so masterfully that she is not shunned as a result. All of this is too much for Eloise, and when her distant cousin's widower starts up a correspondence, she dives in with both feet. A year into it he proposes that they marry, and quite uncharacteristically she steals away in the night and goes to check out Sir Phillip, the botanist. There is a little bit of the Beauty and the Beast about it--Phillip is handsome but brooding and gruff, and Eloise is enchanting. Phillip's first wife was not a love match and she died of melancholy, leaving young twin children to basically fend for themselves because their father is afraid to parent them. Shall we say that it all works out in the end, with an inevitable Bridgerton brother intervention and an equally inevitable happy ending.