A Taxonomy of Rakes
Who is wicked? Who is reformed?
[Hello, a quick note: I’m delighted to announce that Beth, Emma, and I have started a historical romance podcast called Reformed Rakes. If you’d like to listen (we’d be grateful!) check us out wherever you get your podcasts. You can also follow us on Instagram and Twitter. Our first episode, which is already out, is on Cecilia Grant’s Blackshear series.]
In The Lives of the English Rake, Fergus Linnane writes that a rake “was usually a cynical exploiter of women, often a reckless gambler, sometimes a touchy egoist quick to take offense and to seek redress in duels. He could be a good friend and a bad enemy. He was often aristocratic and sometimes rich… He spent his life in a frenzy of sexual pursuits, gambling, drinking, duels and brawls. He treated his equals with cold disdain and his inferiors with dangerous contempt. ”
There’s a rather hilarious review of this book that expresses dismay that this is what rakes were actually like, rather than the charming, quick-witted rogues just waiting for the right wallflower to come along, as we’re used to seeing in historical romance. Linnane’s definition of rake does have a firm line on morality: Charles II — a prolific womanizer — is far too agreeable to be a true rake. His more mean-spirited comrades, the Duke of Buckingham and the Earl of Rochester, achieve the moniker through a combination of dissipation, cruelty, and lawlessness.
Linnane’s rigidity is partially what prompted this essay — a rake is only a rake because of reputation, and public perception is often a funhouse mirror of the truth. There are charming rakes, evil rakes, and rakes that wield their aristocratic power as a cudgel. Romance is about relationships, yes, but it’s also about restoration and atonement. There’s room for all sorts of characters, every variation of rake.
Allow me to categorize them.
The Loquacious Weirdo:
“I don’t have a trace of kindness or nobility in my entire body” Killoran drolly informs his love interest, Emma, in Anne Stuart’s To Love a Dark Lord. This is a revelation the first time, but when we get to roundabouts the sixteenth mention of how Killoran is rotten, just rotten, to the core, it starts to feel like performance art.
Nobody loves a self-indulgent monologue about one’s own dissipation like an Anne Stuart rake. Stuart’s rakes (and those from the same oeuvre) could quite easily fall under the classification of malevolent seducer (more on that later), but I believe they deserve their own separate category for sheer showmanship alone. The spectacle is in the rancorous diatribes, and both the volume of these exhumations and their deft loquaciousness outshine any actual bad acts these rakes perform in the text.
In Stuart’s A Rose at Midnight, Ghislaine’s failed revenge plot lands her in the clutches of her enemy, Nicholas Blackthorne. Blackthorne’s threats against Ghislaine are so frequent that it begins to feel like they weren’t a prelude to torture, but the torture itself. That man is going to talk you to death, Ghislaine.
In Ruthless, Stuart gives us more of a backdrop for the depravity: Rohan runs Heavenly Host, a Hellfire Club-type establishment that the heroine, Elinor, is forced to navigate to find her mother. Rohan is already bored with his surroundings, but luckily he has a new focus: showing up wherever Elinor is going to be and talking at her.
Of course, Anne Stuart isn’t the only historical romance author to craft a verbose antihero. In The Duke’s Wager by Edith Layton, Regina is ruthlessly pursued by two dissolute rakes: The Duke of Torquay and the Marquis of Bessacarr. The marquis is cut from the same cloth as Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons: he’s a sneaky, manipulative liar. The duke attempts to win over Regina more directly: by sharing every weird thought he’s had in his entire life, overwhelming and disorienting her into complacency.
This category would not be complete without a shoutout to Felipe from Teresa Denys’s The Flesh and the Devil, who delivers this extremely metal diatribe to his love interest, Juana: “Kindness is a painless thing to give, and easy, a sop to those you do not need. Friendship and kindness have nought to do with this. I am not kind to the air I breathe—nor the food I eat— nor to you.”
Byronic Rake:
“The Byronic figure eroticizes the voyager so important to the imagination of Western culture,” according to Deborah Lutz in The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative. “The Byronic hero, particularly the Giaour and Childe Harold, remains disenchanted and always astray; he has no place in the domesticity of society.”
There’s a distinct type of aimlessness here, a rake living in a liminal space, moving for the sake of movement. Courtenay in Cat Sebastian’s The Ruin of a Rake has recently returned from London after years spent abroad. His goal is a facsimile of domesticity— he wants to be a part of his nephew’s life, even if it’s just on the fringes, but when that is denied him he’s once again unmoored.
In Black Silk by Judith Ivory, Graham’s aristocratic estate is partially roped off for tourists. His mistress cajoles him into taking her over the velvet cords after-hours so they can have sex, much to Graham’s dismay. “She stepped happily over the boundary line into the areas of his house he didn’t live in, into a public pretense he didn’t inhabit, leaving him on the other side of the ropes, feeling damned if he refused—alone—and damned if he did not. When he stepped over and made love to her, it was always with the growing unease that his whole life was somehow becoming roped off.”
“You are making love to a myth” Graham tells her, “the English upper-class rake.” But the myth excites her, and Graham finds himself untethered—alone in company.
St. Vincent from Kleypas’s Devil in Winter meets Evie after taking the biggest hit to his reputation. He playacts at the malevolent seducer, but no feet-warming husband— however sharp-tongued— makes a convincing case for true maliciousness. St. Vincent’s big bad act (kidnapping Evie’s best friend to force her into an unwanted marriage) is not something that he’s sure he would have seen to its natural, horrifying conclusion if he had the chance. Does that redeem him? No, but the realization disorients him.
St. Vincent rocked his own world by trying, and failing, to hit rock bottom, but Graham—the rake, the myth, the legend—spends the entirety of his book battling public perception, both in court and in print. The Rake of Ronmoor, a serial that distorts Graham’s real-life exploits, turns a well-meaning but sometimes careless man into a mustache-twirling villain. Courtenay also finds himself maligned in print with the release of the gothic hair-bender, The Brigand Prince, whose villain bears a striking resemblance to Courtenay himself.
In The Dangerous Lover Lutz concludes that in a romantic Byronic narrative, “love creates a dwelling place in space and time, filling it up so that it becomes reachable, permeable, pliable.” Through romantic love, the Byronic rake is housed and restored.
And historical romance loves houses, so this progression can take a literal turn. The gaming hell that Evie inherits becomes St. Vincent’s passion project, giving him solid roots. Graham, who starts off in a mausoleum of a grand home, ends his book inheriting his love interest’s contested estate. Courtenay reclaims his family home from his horrible mother’s grasp and is reintroduced to his nephew. And thus, the Byronic rake wanders no more.
The Malevolent Seducer:
In Lutz’s The Dangerous Lover, the malevolent seducer is grouped closely with the dandy. “Control stands as a central concern for the dandy—control of his own appearance, of his manners, of fashions, and of the people around him.”
It’s that control, the cruel manipulation, that turns a standard rake into something far more sinister. In The Duke’s Wager, the Marquis of Bessacar attempts to seduce the innocent Regina by any means necessary. I compared him to Dangerous Liaisons’ Valmont earlier as the tactics are similar: public lamb, private wolf. He keeps a tight rein on Regina, controls what aspects she sees of him, lest she catch on that he’s plotting her ignominious downfall.
Sebastian from Patricia Gaffney’s To Have and to Hold has Rachel Wade in his clutches, but instead of lying to achieve his means, he wields the power of the legal system. Newly released from prison, Rachel has just been charged with vagrancy and is facing the horrifying possibility of arrest once more. Sebastian, Wyckerly’s unfriendly local viscount, joined the magistrate on a drunken lark. When he sees Rachel for the first time at her hearing, he’s annoyed by her passivity. He wants to break her.
“What was it about a woman—a certain kind of woman—standing at the mercy of men—righteous, civic-minded men, with the moral force of public outrage on their side—that could sometimes be so secretly, shamefacedly titillating? He thought of the hypocritical justices from England’s less than glorious past, men who had taken a lewd pleasure in sending women to the stake for witchcraft.”
Sebastian offers Rachel a choice that isn’t a choice at all: return to prison, or come to work for him as a housekeeper. A housekeeper that he can compel to sleep with him.
Sebastian initially notes that Rachel “erased herself,” a survival tactic to withstand unspeakable cruelty while incarcerated. How can you break someone who’s locked herself away? It’s a complicated and evil task. He finds Rachel’s weak spots and prods at them with surgical precision, enacting something akin to psychological torture.
“The dandy, unlike the romantic antihero, lives to represent, to present; he is a play of surfaces, of image, or an aesthetic subjectivity,” says Lutz. The tight grip on control, the affected ruthlessness, is partially a put-on. In The English Rake, Linnane theorizes that rakes were the product of “boredom and spleen,” an excess energy that is channeled into larger and wilder acts. In historical romance there’s a tipping point — where the wake of destruction grows so large it threatens to swallow the rake whole. It’s interesting that Rachel, a woman who’s worked so hard to get by unnoticed post-incarceration, is the one who inadvertently clues Sebastian in on how things really stand. He’s bored of the world? How sad. He’s just the latest in a long line of men who have abused her. She’s bored of him.
Reformed Rake:
I believe the aphorism “reformed rakes make the best husbands” is popular because the reformed rake is, frankly, the monogamous rake. You could argue that the vast majority of historical romance rakes are reformed by the end due to their constancy more than their character.
To actually make this a working category, I’ve tightened the guidelines to a rake who’s already in the throws of reformation when the story starts, a rake who is a rake in name only by this point, but has a lingering reputation he wants to shake off.
At the beginning of Devil’s Daughter by Lisa Kleypas, West Ravenel has already successfully dried out, fully evolved from dissipated rake to a friendly farm equipment enthusiast. West’s past life haunts him in more ways than one: he feels unworthy of his love interest, Phoebe, due to what he sees as his moral failings. But his feelings aren’t all that initially keeps them apart — Phoebe’s late husband was bullied by West in his youth, and Phoebe is primed to view West as a monster, an image that West’s blighted reputation appears to confirm.
Kleypas frequently crafts character arcs over a series of books, so the West we meet in Devil’s Daughter is not the same West we meet in Cold-Hearted Rake. Devil’s Daughter’s West does not need to grow so much as he needs to problematize his past transgressions with Phoebe so they can start their relationship on solid ground.
In Caroline Linden's A Rake’s Guide to Seduction, Anthony Hamilton hangs up his rake hat early. He wants to court his best friend’s sister, Celia Reece, but he announces his intentions mere moments too late. Celia is to be married to someone else, someone infinitely more suitable.
When Celia’s husband dies, she’s a shell of her former self after years of emotional abuse at the hands of her “suitable” husband. Anthony’s love for Celia is selfless, as far from proprietary desire as possible. He could put his effort into making his case, but instead, he puts it into making her whole.
The last two reformed rakes, Gareth in Danelle Harmon’s The Wild One and Theo Mirkwood in A Lady Awakened by Cecilia Grant, have the best of intentions but their prior experience as affable rake does little to prepare them for the responsibility of having someone they care deeply about. The Wild One’s Gareth marries his brother’s widow to give her baby a proper father. The only problem is, Gareth doesn’t know how to be a proper father, so he flails.
Theo is banished to a country estate in A Lady Awakened to learn responsibility. Even with the guidance of his starchy love interest, Martha, Theo has a slower route to learning that he’s cut from the West Ravenel cloth and that land management is kind of his thing.
I wouldn’t want to count his initial reticence against him. Most reformed rakes have a bit of a head start, but that brings a host of new problems as well: how do they live with their new self-awareness? How do they meet challenges they used to comfortably ignore?
Superego Rake:
In Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, the superego is moralization— a drive for perfection. The superego instills a code of behavior learned by parents and society, and any infraction of those standards result in lingering guilt and shame.
The superego rake is tortured by lack of balance: obsessed with their own depravity, conscious of ways they fall short of expectations, and armed with a healthy dose of self-pity. They’re the David Foster Wallace quote fully embodied, that “there’s a lot of narcissism in self-hatred.”
In Loretta Chase’s Lord of Scoundrels, most of Dain’s issues are rooted in his own self-absorption. Seemingly abandoned by his mother, scorned by his xenophobic father, and tormented by the youths at school that circle him like sharks scenting blood, Dain concludes that everyone is always laughing at him. When he meets his love interest Jessica Trent, he wears his rakish disaffection as a shield. If he cares about nothing, nobody will ever laugh at him again. Jessica legitimately finds Dain alluring — she can’t help but be charmed by him, but Dain keeps her at arm’s length. He’s absorbed his father’s cruel lesson all too well— that nobody could ever love him.
Derek Craven, the fan-favorite hero of Kleypas’s Dreaming of You, keeps a constant tally of his worth. Like Dain, Craven lashes out periodically, but Craven’s class resentment adds an extra layer of bitterness. Born in abject poverty but now a wildly successful owner of a gaming hell, Craven regularly sleeps with the aristocratic women he loathes and resents. Their condescension to his bedchamber is “slumming,” and although he’s game in the moment, it wreaks havoc on his self-perception. When he meets the writer Sarah, he can’t deny that he wants her, but the idea of a relationship is a non-starter. In his mind, he’s unworthy, unlovable. He can’t be with Sarah yet — he’s married to misery.
Dissipated Rake:
“It happened this way,” Caroline Knapp writes in her memoir, Drinking: A Love Story. “I fell in love and then, because the love was ruining everything I cared about, I had to fall out.”
I remembered this line the first time I read Mary Jo Putney’s The Rake (formerly The Rake and the Reformer). Near the end of the story, Reggie’s alcoholism appears to be the final nail in the coffin for his relationship with Alys. He’s a genuinely affable man, but the heightened emotion of his fights with Alys, combined with his regression further into his cups, paints a more frightening figure. He looms over Alys and dashes glass against a fireplace. There’s an underlying violence that Alys recognizes, and it’s the last straw.
“Reggie [goes] through the stages of denial, attempted reform and failure,” writes Mary Jo Putney in the Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women anthology. “[Then there’s] the final breakdown—the shattering of the will— that must be experienced before there can be a chance for spiritual and physical regeneration.”
Puntney wrote that she was tired of reading about historical heroes that drink to excess without any potential consequences addressed in the text. She wanted to make Reggie answer to Alys.
In Scandal, Carolyn Jewel uses a dual timeline to reveal Banallt’s before and after: the dissipated rake, and the man who has to piece together his life after the wreckage. Banallt is so utterly, irrevocably in love with Sophie, his former friend’s widow, but he knows that he’s blown his chance by his past behavior. His missteps with Sophie weren’t a direct result of his abuse of alcohol — he had the propensity for carelessness and cruelty already — but his drinking exacerbated these traits.
When they meet again in present-day, Banallt hopes he won’t feel anything, that he won’t be in knots at the mere sight of her. He is “dismayed beyond words” to realize that isn’t the case.
Viscount Sanburne, the hero of Meredith Duran’s Bound by Your Touch, is a surface-level charmer with something more potent brimming underneath. Everything he does is fun, nobody seems to be hurt when he reaches oblivion, until the reveal hits that Sandburne is simply coping. His sister is being held in an asylum and Sandburne feels helpless, guilty, and angry at his father for putting her there. Every potential course of action is met with unsurpassable resistance. Unable to act and plagued by memories, Sandburne seeks solace where he knows he can find it. “I loved the way drink made me feel, and I loved its special power of deflection,” writes Knapp in Drinking: A Love Story. “Its ability to shift my focus away from my own awareness of self and onto something else, something less painful than my own feelings.”
“Ah, to be drunk without guilt. Pure bliss” Nardi de St. Vallier thinks, reveling in his ability to unburden himself. In Bliss by Judy Cuevas, Nardi is a celebrity sculptor who began drinking ether after he publicly fell out of favor due to some hackneyed work. His love interest, Hannah, is an art appraiser’s assistant. Hailing from Miami and previously known for her nickname, “Miss Seven Minutes of Heaven,” Hannah wants to establish herself as someone clever and worthwhile — she wants to have good taste.
In part two of the book, The Radish Eater, Cuevas quotes Michaelangelo Buonarroti: “There is no concept, even of the best artist, that is not contained within the mass of a single marble.” The end of that quote, which Cuevas does not share, is “but only a hand obedient to the mind can penetrate to this image.” In Granta, Rachel Cusk explains that “what this domination relies on – like all domination – is obedience, the obedience of the self, the hand, to the mind’s intentions.”
When Hannah shows Nardi a brooch that she bought, she’s chagrined to tell him it’s tacky and worthless. Hannah’s appraiser’s eye hasn’t developed yet —she thought the brooch was beautiful, only to have her employer tell her it’s valueless. Nardi tells Hannah that her employer is good at quantifying and monetizing taste, but its value to her is what makes it beautiful. This is a lesson he has to learn himself — his fixation on public opinion is to his detriment.
There’s a common thought that people who abuse alcohol (or ether, in this case) lack discipline, which is as untrue as it is uncharitable. Nardi’s sobriety does not come from discipline, from connecting the hand to the mind — it comes from letting go.
The Rakess:
I’m kind of loathe to gender this category, which I obviously made for Seraphina from Scarlett Peckham’s The Rakess, but I feel like her circumstances are so specifically tied to her womanhood that it’s necessary. Seraphina seems so much like the answer to Reggie from Mary Jo Putney’s The Rake that I will feel a little bit crazy if that’s unintentional on Peckham’s part.
Reggie’s alcoholic destruction hints at violence — he looms, he backs Alys into a corner. Seraphina’s is the self-immolating kind. As a Wollestonecraft-esque writer and activist, she’s publicly scorned— not in the gentle snubbing of the ton but in actual, gender-based violence. She’s fine, she’s fine, she’s fine — until she’s not.
Just like Reggie chases off Alys, Seraphina deliberately goads her love interest, Adam, with her dissipation. A soused Seraphina is crueler than he’s used to — more biting. He knows she’s destroying herself, but he’s not going to stick around to watch.
Seraphina admits to herself that “she succeeded in doing what she set out to do the night she’d driven him away: destroyed his regard for her in one fatal hour, so she would not have to suffer losing it, inevitably, in bits.”
The Rake’s Reggie is burdened by his title, his estate, and his interest in growth he can’t seem to manifest. Seraphina’s burdens are wider in scope: she has lofty ambitions that make what she sees as her personal failings all the more devastating. She thought she couldn’t depend on anyone for support, so her reliance on Adam was a threat to her well-being. When she achieves sobriety she’s wistful about what she could have had, and relieved to realize that the breakup left Adam similarly devastated. “I’m reduced by the loss of you” he tells her.
The Charmer:
There’s a specific type of rake that escapes an assignation by way of balcony or trellis, a ne’er do well that’s charming enough that these antics are delightfully roguish, rather than predatory. The appeal is refreshingly simple: they’re charismatic— someone that you would want to be around.
First we have two Colins: Colin Eversea from Julie Anne Long’s The Perils of Pleasure and Colin Sandhurst from Tessa Dare’s A Week to Be Wicked. Eversea has two legendary escapes: one is from an execution in Newgate prison, and the other is “dangling from a trellis outside Lady Malmsey's window.” Before the former turned him into a folk hero, the latter built his reputational foundation: Colin is heavy on the escapades but light on discretion. Sandhurst is similarly induced to shenanigans, which is why he’s an easy mark for a spinster’s road trip proposition.
When we meet King from Sarah MacLean’s The Rogue Not Taken, he’s escaping a lady’s bedchamber by way of a rose trellis. Largely known as a veteran charmer, King struggles with getting his love interest Sophie to comply with his wishes. This is the eternal struggle of the charmer: they fall for someone who is, if not immune to their magnetism, rather unmalleable.
Rhine Fontaine from Beverly Jenkins’s Forbidden falls for Eddy fast, but he doesn’t have an easy time of it. She’s too busy building her new career as a chef to prioritize a man who is engaged elsewhere and is not free to pursue her. In Lady Gallant by Suzanne Robinson, Christian de Rivers is a bombastic rogue who falls for Nora, a woman so shy that she’s not just overwhelmed by his attentions, but fearful of them. 1
The Duke of Jervaulx from Laura Kinsale’s Flowers from the Storm is a bit too serious-minded to comfortably fit into this category, but there’s an early scene in the book that establishes the tenor of his beguiling rakishness so well that I think of it often. When his mistress asks why he drinks bitter chocolate, he croons: “You’re the sugar, my sweet.”
Dynastic Rake:
Rakes are overwhelmingly aristocrats or landed gentry, but a dynastic rake is differentiated by how the family unit closes ranks around them. Yes, I’m talking about the Bridgertons.
In The Viscount Who Loved Me, Anthony Bridgerton may be the scourge of widows and opera singers, but his status as “Capital R Rake” only really makes sense when you realize that it was bequeathed due to proximity more than notoriety. The moniker was coined by a sheltered neighbor who is, admittedly, fascinated by the family. How many rakes did Penelope, writing as Lady Whistledown, know to compare, exactly? Moreover, Anthony’s rakish ways rather neatly coexist with duty: he’s able to compartmentalize the different aspects of his life and remain a hero in his family’s eyes.
Benedict Bridgerton is a classic case of second son syndrome, and in truth could very comfortably fit into the above malevolent seducer category. In An Offer from a Gentleman there is not actually an offer: Benedict threatens his love interest with prison if she does not either become his mistress or work in his mom’s household. (Remember Sebastian offering Rachel the housekeeper position in To Have and to Hold? Same concept, same strings attached.)
Colin is oft-described as a charming rake, but in Romancing Mr. Bridgerton he spends more time channeling his aristocratic ennui into nagging Penelope and cosplaying as working class than displaying that fabled charm. The three eldest Bridgerton men have different variations of family hangups—Anthony is burdened by familial duty, Benedict by lack of distinction (always the viscount’s brother, never the viscount!), and Colin by a seemingly purposeless existence borne of aristocratic boredom—problems disappear because of the strength of the Bridgerton family name. Anthony’s snubbing of Edwina for her sister Kate does not envelop them in lingering scandal, Benedict is able to rather neatly spring his love interest Sophie from prison (He didn’t put her there! But he could have) thanks to his mother’s assistance, and the scandalous reveal of Lady Whistledown’s identity falls short of earth-shattering partially because Colin, and the rest of his family, align themselves with Penelope.
In what is perhaps the most frustrating example of dynastic wealth in historical romance I can think of, Devil’s Bride by Stephanie Laurens also relies on the heft of esteemed lineage. Devil Cynster and his love interest, Honoria Anstruther-Weatherby spend approximately one-third of the book just saying their last names at each other as though it should mean something to the layman. (“Just like an Anstruther-Weatherby.” What does that mean? I don’t know her!) 2
“Devil” is also a nickname by way of a nanny, so essentially, Devil spent his entire life being raised and lauded as a potential hellion. Nothing that the last name “Cynster” can’t paper over, though.
In Judith McNaught’s Whitney, My Love, Clayton Westmoreland, who would likely be a malevolent seducer if he had a firmer grasp on Whitney, spends the entirety of the book in a rather fraught push-and-pull with her. Clayton wants Whitney but won’t take the time to understand her, viciously punishes her for his misconceptions, and then has to grovel. The final grovel stops short of being another honeymoon phase in cyclical abuse only through McNaught’s tacked-on epilogue that references the Westmoreland dynasty. Whitney discovers a picture of Jennifer Westmoreland, the heroine of A Kingdom of Dreams, and is incredibly moved, contextualizing her place in the line of beloved Westmoreland women.
Rake/Off:
This is the false rake, or ‘rake as a cover.’ Cut from the cloth of Sir Percy Blakeney, the pseudo buffoon from The Scarlet Pimpernel, but with a dash more sexual appeal.3
Bai Huang from Jeannie Lin’s The Lotus Palace expertly plays the part of the outlandish and charismatic rake. “Is it the tremor of the earth, or the sight of you that unsettles me?” he asks the heroine, Yue-ying. Yue-ying works for the startlingly lovely courtesan Mingyu, who Bai Huang is courting for show — a purposeful ruse in his spying. When Yue-ying appears to be humoring Bai Huang’s antics, he realizes how disappointed he is that she sees him as a dilettante. He wants to know her better — he wants her to know him.
Tommy Wynchester from Erica Ridley’s The Perks of Loving a Wallflower has a host of disguises, but she’s remarkably comfortable wearing one in particular: that of charming rake Baron Vanderbean. As the baron, Tommy finally approaches her long-term crush, a bluestocking named Philippa, and they engage in a fake (but not that fake!) courtship.
Like Bai Huang with Yue-ying, Tommy wants Philippa to get to know her in truth, so she lets Philippa in on the ruse early. During one of their flirtations, Philippa tells Tommy that “you needn’t play the rake now, when no one can hear you.” Tommy’s response is devastating: “You can hear me.”
It’s one thing to give up a past-time of profligacy, but the not-really-a-rake spy has a much more difficult task: incorporating their love interest into their task. The real rake is often bored, but the pretend rake? Riveted — overwhelmed and engaged.
Thanks for reading! I obviously couldn’t write a comprehensive list as we’d be here all week, but I’d love to hear about your favorite rakes.
Here’s a link to the Reformed Rakes website again, if you’d like to check us out.
In Lady Gallant, Christian does something earth-shatteringly cruel to the heroine, Nora. I think this would disqualify him from being seen as a charmer to some, but I don’t necessarily think his general joie de vivre precludes him from being capable of that act. If anything, it makes it more devastating.
I wrote in my Goodreads review that “If this book was set 200+ years in the future these jokers would be mentioned in the Panama papers.” Apparently I still have strong feelings.
I debated for a really long time about if I should include Lord Vere from Sherry Thomas’s His at Night, as the book is a riff on The Scarlet Pimpernel. Vere’s disguise is less rakish and more full-on-buffoon, so I left him out.