A Company of Swans

Categories: Romance , Fiction

I needed something pleasant to read the other day, so I picked up Eva Ibbotson’s 1985 romance, A Company of Swans.  I was as charmed as I had hoped to be.  Ibbotson’s romances are as sweet and elegant as meringues. 

Harriet Morton is the dutiful daughter of a stern Cambridge don in the early years of the twentieth century.  Since her mother died, her life is grey and repressed (so is the aunt who looks after her), and the only joy she has is her dance classes with a Russian prima ballerina.

An impresario comes to her class to recruit members of a company to tour South America.  Of course, her father and aunt are horrified at the suggestion, but Harriet, obedient Harriet, rebels and runs away to join the troupe. 

Naturally, she finds romance as well.  She meets Rom Verney, who ran away himself many years before after a love affair went bad.  Now he’s one of the leading citizens in his English expatriate community in Brazil.

This romance doesn’t run smoothly either, but of course any reader of the genre knows that all will end well.  And sometimes that’s just what you want.