People would like a lady to be beautiful, but they expect her to be ladylike, in short: sweet, compliant, and refined.” One of the ways the reader understands that Linnet belongs in Piers’s world is that the intelligence, tartness, assertiveness, and earthiness that had to be hidden in the polite world are the very qualities that make her a suitable match for the Beast.
Her aunt cautions her, “I’ve told you time and time again, all that cleverness does you no good. It marks her as a misfit in London society. You look like a wanton.” While Beauty is often described as a booklover (Think Disney’s Belle), Linnet’s intelligence is as important as her beauty in WBTTB. Her aunt says to her, “That dimple, and something in your eyes and about your mouth. James begins her story with Linnet’s virtue being questioned, and Linnet’s beauty has a sensual quality that is a marked contrast to the more typical innocent beauty. Traditionally, the heroine is the youngest of three sisters, and her virtue equals her beauty. James’s take on the story is unique among those I’ve read. Scholars have identified 179 Beauty and the Beast tales from different countries, and most romance readers can easily list several favorite treatments of the tale. (Only Eloisa James would create a butler and name him Prufrock.) Between first meeting and HEA, the reader will find the kind of banter possible only between two intelligent people with a keen sense of humor, the gradual revelation of the individuals beneath their cultivated surfaces, and a cast of wonderful secondary characters. Of course, the rest of the book is devoted to their discovering that what each most truly desires is to spend a lifetime together.
Within pages of meeting one another, Linnet and Piers agree they will not be marrying one another. Her desperate father arranges her betrothal to Piers Yelverton, Earl of Marchant, known in London as “the Beast” and sends her off to Wales where the Beast, supposedly sexually impotent, terrorizes most of those within and around his castle. Linnet Thrynne possesses the kind of beauty that bemuses and enchants men from commoners to princes, but even so great a beauty as Linnet’s cannot overcome the disgrace of a shattered reputation. In When Beauty Tamed the Beast, her second fairytale-based romance novel, Eloisa James combines elements of the traditional story with subtle subversions of it to weave a tale rich with humor, high in sizzle factor, and substantive in its portrayal of love as a healing, transforming power.
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