The Agency for Scandal (2023) is a children’s/YA late-Victorian set romantic romp with a dash of adventure and a feminist core. Isobel Stanhope has inherited her father’s talent for lock-picking but also his debts–which she must keep a secret from her delicate mamma and her younger brother, conveniently away at school. She is recruited to a mysterious agency called The Aviary, led by Miss Finch, a group of women dedicated to righting the wrongs that patriarchy inflicts on their sisters, and often using rather sneaky means to do so. Isabel is infatuated with Max Vane, Duke of Roxteth, who barely notices her–and indeed, one reason why Isobel, or Izzy, is a successful member of the Aviary is her ability to blend into the background, whether disguised as a young male pickpocket urchin or in the role that comes most naturally to her, a timid wallflower on the edges of glittering balls. And the ballroom scenes here are fairly dreamy:
The enormous entrance hall, with its marble columns, was crammed with ferns and hothouse flowers sent down from the greenhouses at Chatsworth, and there was a huge marble basin filled with water lilies. It was warm, and the smell was dizzying, sweet and musky. The famous crystal staircase with its carved glass handrail had been festooned with flowers. An orchestra by the foot of the staircase was playing jauntily as we waited to climb the stairs for our audience with the duke and duchess who were holding a receiving line. (175)
Behind the glittering facade, there is, of course, intrigue and danger, if not treason. When Izzy and Max are thrown together via a mystery involving a ruby jewel and a sinister husband who is clearly anticipating Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play Gas Light in torturing his new young wife, they get to know each other as people outside their designated social roles, and Max has a lot of unlearning to do about his place in the world and the women who in legal terms exist in its margins, lacking agency.
This is a fun romp, if fairly formulaic (Izzy has freckles, Max is not as stiff as he seems)–there’s little suspense, and the solving of the mystery and the climactic conclusions, as well as Izzy’s revelation of secrets she has harboured for years, is brushed past fairly quickly in favour of advancing the romance, which is where most of the tension is embedded. The novel is also guilty of one of my personal pet peeves in historical fiction, in that the idiom is often modern. I don’t expect writers of Victorian-set fiction to embrace the barrage of metaphor and feeling of the Brontës, or the convoluted phrasing of Dickens, or Oscar Wilde’s exquisite curlicues of language–but there must be a way of representing a historical feeling even if word choice and sentence structure are clarified for modern readers. (Robin Stevens and Sarah Waters come to mind.) For example, Izzy talks about having to “generate an income”, and notes that “Things between Max and I felt increasingly complicated”, and responds “Fine” instead of “very well”. Overall, however, it’s a fun breezy read, and the central idea of the Aviary is genuinely an intriguing concept. I’d have liked this a lot when I was tennish to fifteenish, and I enjoyed it now.
