#inclineto

I will forever believe that Thomas loves them very much but doesn't really have a clue - about either of them. He seems like exactly the sort of person to spin out a half-correct understanding of someone's deepest self, and then to build on THAT, rather than what's in front of him. 

He’s just SO convinced he has all the answers--partly obviously a symptom of growing up an earl’s son, partly I would wager a reaction against the general awfulness of his father. He is correct, he is moral, he is better than the world he was raised in; which allows for his remarkable conviction but also, I think, does exactly what you say. He loves them, and therefore they must be who he thinks they are: it’s not malicious, but it also doesn’t give them a lot of allowance for existing outside his imagination.

omg 

I'll always be there for a lady in a blue dress, but this is what I really love: "even though it means hurting someone she does love, and she does so honestly, carefully, but firmly"

I also meant to say - I really liked the reminder that the first time we see her, Miss Wintertowne is the one sticking up for magicians. (And on rereading, the thought of *Childermass* wishing for a chaperone made me laugh.)

Yeah, there’s a horrible irony to the fact that Emma is originally the only one who seems well-disposed to Norrell, and she’s the one he ends up sacrificing to further his cause. It’s interesting to imagine what her post-JSAMN relationship with magic to be, if her experiences will set her dead against it, or if she’ll remember her old love for it, now that it’s restored for everyone.

We truly should! So far it seems to be a taxonomy of erotic sainthood, excellent uses of ropes, sexy jewellery, and suggestively revealed throats; your suggestions can really only improve it.

(I do have emotions--even acute ones!--about Dominic Frey that don’t involve sex, though evidently from this tag you wouldn’t know it.)

(The thing is, when one cuts their life in half and then cuts half of that life in half again, one does end up with a quarter of a life that is very much about sex and also very much about one’s innermost life of the soul etc., and those things do become awfully conflated.)

True, I'm not an especially discerning mystery reader: there are people who read them for the pleasure of detection, and people who read them to watch characters forced by circumstances to admit uncomfortable truths to and about one another. I'm in the second camp, so as long as the mystery isn't too ridiculously contrived, I'm mostly satisfied.

I think you're right that she's settled into a comfortable partnerships pattern, which is great in real life, but far less satisfying in fiction. (I also couldn't help but feel she was more interested in gleefully waiting to reveal the incredibly obvious about the brother, and while that fills the demands of a mystery for secrets, and secondary relationships are a trope of romance, this time it felt like a sop and a distraction.)

In conclusion: as I was reading, I kept wondering what this book would have been like from Fenella's POV. [And to change subjects, because the number of comments here is getting to be too much, thanks for the rec of Portrait; it's added to the list!]

I’m definitely in the second camp, as well, which I why I did enjoy the set-up of the side romance but was completely puzzled as to why the secrets and uncomfortable truths being revealed were theirs to Pat and not Pat’s and Fen’s to one another. The drama of their romance seemed to usurp the drama of Pat/Fen instead of run alongside it, which is why it felt so artificial and intrusive, I think, despite the fact that, as you say, there was nothing about it per se that was out of place. “A sop and a distraction” is entirely it: I’m not sure whether Charles got bored of writing her female characters or thought her readers would get bored of reading about them, but either way, it wasn’t a good look.

Though I understand that she was trying to mirror ToE’s one-narrator structure, I too found myself really missing getting a view into Fen’s head. (For that matter, I miss Daniel’s pov in ToE, too.) And while I see its purpose in ToE and I think I could see its purpose in PE, it felt like it robbed the book of a level of depth which it could hardly spare.

@mysharkwillgoon​, unkind! I deserve at least 17.5% of the blame, having let the fox in the bawdy house. the badger in the gambling den. or something