So. While visiting Kayte & co., we went to a secondhand store and on the nautical shelf, we encountered this book. Two Hundred Men, One Woman by Nancy Price.

Naturally, I had to buy it for the excellent title alone. Best $5 I ever spent. I also promised Kayte, Bee and Fawkes that I would liveblog this book. Because it is already Quality Literature, I thought I would share the love for all. I will be posting updates as I go, feel free to comment/ask questions/do dramatic readings/whatever if you have feelings about this masterpiece <3

Accordingly, there will be spoilers in this thread. In case anyone else had this on their TBR.

BUT THUS IT BEGINS.

This is a Regency romance (possibly erotica? remains to be seen) published in 2009. (Also it has illustrations.) We all saw the name of the ship on the cover, HMS Persuasion, and this was funny for obvious (cough Netflix cough) reasons.

Things I didn't fully realise until I opened the book properly: the ship name was not just a respectful nod to Jane Austen in general, queen of the regency romance. No. Nooooo. The main character of this is one Sophia Wentworth.................. the Frederick Wentworth's sister. This is Persuasion fanfiction, y'all. To badly paraphrase chapter 49 of Moby Dick, the whole universe is a joke and I am the punchline. Help.

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CHAPTER ONE
Sophia Wentworth is a pretty redhead, delight of the town. She goes to a ball and no one is dancing with her??? Everyone is whispering about her??? What's going on??? Answer: her father is bankrupt and didn't think to tell her. Anyway, she gets drunk on three glasses of wine and then gets asked out to the gardens by one Mr. Fortunatus (Fortune) Croft. No one will marry her now, will they?

Well, Fortune wants to.



He sounds a bit like a stalker, actually. But they make out a bit in the garden and she agrees and he takes her home very drunk, she is basically passed out in the carriage, and Fortune has been made a post-captain so he's got to leave tomorrow. So he tells her father instead and Dr. Wentworth says hell no, I'm taking her with me, I have lost everything else so I need my one beloved daughter to Be My Maid. End chapter one.

CHAPTER TWO
So Sophia stuffs some bread in her reticule and she and her father are off, fleeing the bailiffs. Notably, this is also how Captain Jack Aubrey's situation begins in Master & Commander, but his bankruptcy really didn't stop him living in reasonably nice inns and whatnot and just skipping town when people caught up to him. The Wentworths, however, are in a dingy cottage with no staff. Her father's a jerk.

CHAPTER THREE
Nancy Price is obsessed with men's hard gilt uniform buttons crushing women through thin linen dresses. It's only chapter three and I hate that I know this already. Sophia Wentworth is: remembering makeout sessions and scrubbing floors. Her assigned fake!name for the time being is Mary Rand. Her father gets sick and dies. Convenient. Now "Mary Rand" is no longer a lady and entirely alone in the world, and so she rocks up to The Rose Revived, a tavern where "women make money on their back". Uh oh. Anyway, she only wants to be a barmaid or to sweep the floors. Eyebrows are raised. Men leer at her.

CHAPTER FOUR
...begins with this.

Men continue leering.


Raffle entry to the first person who uses "peach-cheeked image of pulchritude" as a line in a post.

CHAPTER FIVE
Timeskip, I think? Fortunatus Croft is back from sea. Prizes: won, new frigate: anchored, nickname: "Born Lucky", because Nancy Price thinks she's so clever. Sophia: disappeared. He could have a Fine Lady now, but he only wants one woman. He has a hip-bath and a bunch of self-image issues:


CHAPTER SIX
Using his manly wiles and an old coachman of the Wentworths' to track Sophia down, Fortune shows up at the Rose Revived, huzzah. They have the marriage conversation again, and "because sailors live hard and fast on land", he's ready to marry her today, and gives her a ruby ring – but Sophia doesn't believe him, lol, so she runs away.

TBC...

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I have the audiobook of this, that I picked up in a sale on humble bundle - I havn't listened to it yet, but I did not realise I would be missing out on drawings! LMAO!!

I'll need to start it!

  

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Gin made something stunning

I have the audiobook of this, that I picked up in a sale on humble bundle - I  havn't listened to it yet, but I did not realise I would be missing out on drawings! LMAO!!

I'll need to start it!

OH NO THERE'S AN AUDIOBOOK?!?! oh god

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YEah, it was in a humble bundle with Sense, Sensibility and Sea Monsters, it was a 'historical fiction' bundle, but I now take the use of "peach-cheeked image of pulchritude'' in a post as a personal challenge. How delightfully overwritten!

  

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Gin made something stunning

All this talk about his feet better be foreshadowing.

Also idk what his jaw is doing here but I can't stop looking at it...

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It's the mullet that gets me! - Business in the front, party in the back and a muppet in the jaw line

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Gin made something stunning

If you note the small NP on his belt I think it is a safe assumption to make that the author drew these herself.

A true passion project.

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CHAPTER SEVEN
Sophia can't believe he'll come after her. There is endless character introspection in this, and a lot of "how could he want to marry a scrub at the inn". By 'a lot' I mean too fucking much. This book definitely had no editor, and if I have to read "a scrub at the inn" once more I will have to scrub my eyes out with bleach.

Anyway, guess what? He comes after her, surprise.

Wow, so hot. Anyway he's a decent gent, he says if she doesn't actually wanna marry him, he'll just give her money to go to London and do her own thing. But anyway he shows her his nice house and she agrees to marry him that afternoon with a lieutenant as a witness and then they're gonna come back to that house and she'll be happy ever after.

CHAPTER EIGHT
But FIRST: a lady needs a new damn wardrobe.

Is "fashion babies" a period accurate term for model dolls? Idk man, idk. Anyway now that she's all dressed up in finery:

Mmm, like a newly ripened fruit. They go back to their room at the inn before they're actually married, and they start kissing, and Sophia tells him since they last met she's learnt how to butcher pigs (Fortune: "Stop! Stop! You're not only beautiful enough to blind a man, but useful as well?") and Fortune has (~dark angsty man moment~) learned to kill people. Nevertheless:

So, they have their quickie wedding that afternoon, and after that they are duty-bound to attend the Admiral's ball instead of consummating the thing.

CHAPTER NINE

In spite of this picture, the newlyweds head off to the ball...


[sounds of incoherent fury]

...and everything at the ball goes well until Sophia is interrogated by some bitch called Caroline, where they have this venomous exchange:


It is soon explained that Fortune is not a cad, and Caroline just saw him get half-naked once to rescue a man overboard. It's all good. It is never explained why Nancy Price keeps flipflopping between "Admiral Hazelton" and "Admiral Hazleton".

CHAPTER TEN

But spelling is the least of our worries, because the gilt buttons are back. And hard.



Sexy. Or... not?



Sophia, please, don't say that to your husband. Anyway, oh no, shock and horror: there is NO TIME TO ACTUALLY HAVE SEX, because GUESS WHO'S BANKRUPT NOW? Fortune's prize agent ran off with all the prize money in his coffers so now it's Fortune's turn to be in major debt and on the run from the bailiffs. Cue: much angsting about who is poorer than who. We get it, guys. Neither of you is a catch.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

We are holed up in a new inn and arguing some more about what to do. "I'm the millstone around your neck"; "no I'm the millstone", and so on. Finally they decide that Sophia should come to sea with him as the Captain's wife.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Sophia gets some last minute lessons from the landlady on how to be a Captain's wife at sea, and Fortune goes to ask the Admiral's permission to take her. He also leaves her a bunch of letters he wrote to her back in the day when she was rich and he didn't dare talk to her, and she reads these. They are... er... interesting. You may never know how I whisper your name under my breath when I stand along the wall and watch you dance. I wish death and damnation to every man who touches your hand. Mmkay.



Permission is emphatically granted? WHICH MEANS WE'RE FINALLY GOING TO SEA, HURRAH!



TBC...

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A/N: I have now finished the whole book, but it's going to take some time to mentally process so we're going to rewind to simpler times to recap first, enjoy~

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

False fucking alarm, there's another filler chapter of preparation where they sew pockets into her dresses and she buys a geranium. 

CHAPTER FOURTEEN



Now we're at sea! Welcome to HMS Persuasion, where we are introduced to the captain's seat-of-ease (Sophia marvels at this chamberpot "Amazing! Hanging as high as a tree" over the water) and also introduced to Fortune's crew. You've got your usual folks and then a pair to keep an eye on: the Congreve brothers. We actually met these two on land, briefly. A knight's sons, the elder is called Calder, the younger Aaron, and they were both passing their time stopping carriages as highwaymen, the rascals. Anyway, turns out instead of getting them hanged, Fortune has press-ganged them onto the ship. Great idea, dude. They'll be important later.

Anyway, Sophia's first taste of life at sea is watching a man flogged for desertion from the premium view of the quarterdeck. With a cup of tea, because we're extremely British here. "Will the flogged man die?" Sophia asks. Fortune: "Yeah probably." He's got bigger problems, because they're crossing the channel in a storm. Sophia is left to eat dinner below, including a pudding called Drowned Baby.



Up on the ratlines, we discover that the flogged man was actually Calder Congreve, the resident bad boy with a still-bleeding back. He and his bro have already spent time in a prison hulk. (I'm sorry, prison hulks never don't make me think of Jean Valjean.) Guy next to him falls overboard and drowns (see above). Like Calder needed literally anything else to radicalise him. You know, if he weren't actually a rich boy.



CHAPTER FIFTEEN
"Suddenly a crash rocked her wooden world." Meanwhile, in the captain's quarters...





Well, actually, first Fortune comes in and Sophia's already asleep so he sets up some cushions on the floor and is having nightmares about how tough and terrible he is, yadda yadda. But someone's got their hands on his breeches ?





The next day and they're at it again. Please stop ruining cannons for me like this, Nancy Price, I beg you.



Anyway Trundle the captain's steward failed to pass along Fortune's verbal sexts to Sophia last time he was up on deck, so instead they get poor little cabin boy Robby Wegg to run up and down with them, nice. It keeps storming and Sophia noses around Fortune's stuff. Damn, he's even read Mary Wollstonecraft?



CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The storms are finally over so we and Sophia get an in-depth tour of the ship so Nancy can spit all the facts and vocab she knows about naval life. I respect this, Nancy. You're trying so hard to be Patrick O'Brian here and I love it. Fortune, who has top secret orders from the Admiralty he can't tell anyone about, gets the crew in shape with gun drills. Calder is Scheming with a capital S.



CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
This is my favourite illustration of them all.



Fortune is despairing of his crew full of jailbirds and ne'er-do-wells. Sophia is despairing of Fortune's fondness for flogging. (His men, that is.) Well, if this isn't the perfect moment for Aaron Congreve, Calder's brother, "the handsome prisoner" – and now a ship's clerk – to rock up and meet Sophia. He's got "thick, shining blond hair" and "deep blue eyes", is not more than twenty and writes a neat hand and immediately scatters his papers everywhere. Oh look, he even sketches. 



WHEN HE LEAVES, THE SHIP'S GOAT FOLLOWS AFTER HIM LIKE A DOG.

We get a little peek into Aaron's POV now, where he is lying on his bunk. ("Mrs. Croft had smiled at him, of course. His coat and breeches were inches too small.") His father is only interested in his heir, Calder. ("Let Aaron be a sailor," his father would say. "Beat the university out of him.") Aaron's a good guy who only came to find Calder to tell him their father was sick and then got mixed up in the highwayman business. He has a weak chest, life at sea isn't good for him. He thinks he looks ridiculous. It's a hard life being a knight's younger son who won't inherit.

Anyway, Aaron sneaks off to tell Calder off for trying to desert and making him lie about shit for him. Calder wants to kill Fortune. Aaron won't help him. Aaron goes to write an angry diary entry calling Fortune a tyrant.

Time is passing, Fortune is adamant about gun practice, Sophia is sitting down in the surgeon's cockpit and the surgeon is too drunk to be useful. Sophia rolls up her sleeves and starts giving men stitches like she's doing embroidery. Sophia saves the man's leg. Both Aaron and Fortune see her covered in blood and think she's hot. Sophia wants to take over surgeon duties. Fortune shakes his head and explains that the crew are totally going to think she's doing witchcraft.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Chapter 18 features:

Men talking about witches;
Fortune solving the surgeon problem by assigning Aaron (who is a Learned man and has also conveniently happened to study medicine) to supervise the medical stuff as well as doing the books, even though he has noticed Aaron "worships her from afar";
Aaron gaining popularity and free makeovers aboard by paying sailors in portraits;
Men washing their clothes in urine bc ammonia bleaches, hashtag gritty realism;
The fact that a girl once told Aaron his calves were shapely, ooooh boy;
Aaron and Sophia bonding over medical texts... and suck it Fortune, you've read Wollstonecraft? Aaron has met her, and can quote her, and generally makes Fortune look like an oaf by comparison (Sophia's into it. Ngl, I'm into it);
Aaaaaaand, last but not least, the best drawing of a fish I've ever seen in my life.



TBC...

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