Cynthia’s Chauffeur by Louis Tracy

Description

Derby Day falls that year on the first Wednesday in June, the sky is on its best behavior and the world is out for a holiday. In the crush of Epsom, Cynthia, who is everything a golden girl of the Edwardian road should be, engages a car and a chauffeur, and thereby contracts the day’s most profitable hazard: a driver with manners above his station and a past he is not advertising.

What follows is an automobile tour of the sunnier counties of the English soul: breakdowns repaired with heroism, inns that presently receive the wrong guests, and the slow, inevitable discovery that a professional chauffeur may be several other professions as well. Tracy steers the pair by degrees toward the French roads and the romance the title has promised since page one, and the book performs its single perfect trick with complete assurance: it makes being delighted feel like the most sensible thing in the world.

Why the road romance works

• A heroine too sensible to miss the obvious and too charming to be safe from it.
• Edwardian automobiling described as adventure rather than apparatus.
• The disguised-hero romance polished to a mirror shine.

About This DodaBooks Edition

All 27 chapters are reset in clean, continuous type with a working index.