A Perfect Hand

A pair of Victorian servants plot to make their employers fall for each other in this witty upstairs-downstairs double romance from Waldman (Love and Treasure). Alice Lockey is the smart, ambitious personal maid of Lady Jemima Alderwick, a spoiled aristocrat eager to marry. When Lord Nigel Wynstowe visits the Alderwick estate in 1879, Alice falls in love with his valet, Charlie Wells. Hoping to find a way to be together and keep their jobs, they sour Lady Jemima on her current suitor by exposing his philandering, and attempt to turn the attention of ancestry-obsessed Lord Wynstowe to romance. Meanwhile, Lady Jemima’s aunt, recognizing Alice’s intelligence and drive, introduces her to the ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill, as well as her friends in the suffrage movement. Much as Alice loves Charlie, she begins to wonder if his desired future—marriage, children, and owning a rural shop—will be enough to fulfill her. Waldman evokes Jane Austen in her clever observations (“It was impossible to be frivolous while scrubbing stains out of another’s dirty underclothes”), and adds a fresh and modern edge to the story’s familiar material via Alice’s involvement with the period’s “radical” ideas. There’s much to enjoy in this tale of balancing love and ambition. Agent: Mary Evans, Mary Evans, Inc. (May)