Website Archive.org has several Berta Ruck novels available to read online or to borrow, and it’s free. Berta Ruck set His Official Fiancee in 1913, in London, a London suburb and the seashore in Wales. The book was published in 1914, likely before the war broke out in August, and Berta does not mention the war or international tensions.
Monica’s father died a year before the novel begins and left nothing except a feckless son wandering the Earth and 20 year old Monica. She used her tiny bit of money to take a business course, shorthand and typing, then got a roommate for a cramped upstairs apartment and a beastly typist job at 25 shillings a week.
The other three office girls and she view their ultimate boss, Mr. Waters, as “Still Waters”, more a machine than a man. Monica is terrified she will be fired when he calls her into his office, but that is not the case. Instead Mr. Waters wants to hire her to pretend to be his fiancee for a year at 10 pounds a year (or 8 times her typist wage). Monica is going to refuse when she gets a telegram from her worthless brother demanding 100 pounds to keep him out of jail.
The plot around the fake engagement is far fetched of course, but get by that and ignore the sentence slamming a Jewish man and you have a gem of a book. Mrs. Ruck creates a lovely world, well-run homes with plenty of money and big gardens, dressing for dinner, unobtrusive servants. Monica appreciates her visit to Mr. Waters’ home even more after living on her own at a miserable wage. Even more than physical comforts, Monica appreciates her future mother-in-law, a wonderful woman, warm-hearted, kind, welcoming.
One of the telling scenes is when Monica and Mr. Waters stop into her apartment and find her erstwhile admirer, Sydney Vandeleur visiting her roommate Cecily. Before getting her brother’s money demand, Monica had considered falling in love with Sydney, except he was supposedly out of the country, and she was not in love with him. This visit she realizes Sydney is silly, a man content to fritter away his days and his talents, and by contrast Mr. Waters is vigorous, hard-working, and never silly.
It’s fun to read about a pleasant, gracious era, assuming one is upper crust and not laboring for 25 shillings a week. It reminds me of some P G Wodehouse novels, and Sydney is a perfect example of Bertie Wooster’s friends in the Drones Club.
Mrs. Ruck’s style is different from most modern writers yet enjoyable and easy enough to follow. Monica is well-written, full of character and lively determination. She’s realistic enough to know that living on beans is tolerable when one is 21 but quite the opposite when one is 41.
As I read His Official Fiancee I kept thinking of The Great War about to fall upon the people in the story. Both Sydney and Mr. Waters are about 30, unmarried, and Sydney is a drone. Both would be likely called up and given the horrific casualty figures of WWI, likely both would have died in the battles or the diseases afterwards. Our heroine, her friends, her in-laws would have been devastated.
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