Whitney Never Stops Trying

The Herculean effort in Judith McNaught's classic

From Whitney, My Love’s original 1985 cover. Illustrated by Harry Bennett.

I’m going to level with you: I had an agenda for Whitney, My Love. When I decided to write about the influential 1985 Regency romance in a fit of pique I already had a tagline in my head: Judith McNaught builds, then breaks, the perfect woman. The dots aligned, rather too neatly, with my own experience with womanhood: it’s fucking impossible and I hate it.

I can connect these dots in my sleep, but when I’m sober, when I’ve reread the book and I have a more clear-eyed view of Whitney Stone I realized that I got it all wrong.

I’ve given up, but Whitney never stops trying.

The Hoyden

The book begins with a fifteen-year-old Whitney Stone, standing precariously on top of a moving horse, trying to catch the attention of her crush, Paul Sevarin. Paul is the perfect target for unmitigated teenage desire: blonde, affable, older, and within a certain physical proximity. His annoyance with Whitney’s attentions, which are juvenile but not harmless (she accidentally breaks his leg!), frequently gives way to amusement. Everyone knows Whitney’s artless game, but it’s fun to see her move the pieces.

With… a few notable exceptions.

“Whitney’s manners are an outrage, her conduct is reprehensible. She is a willful hoyden who is the despair of everyone she knows and an embarrassment to me.” Her father tells her aunt. “This—this thing… I am mortified to tell you is your niece.”

Whitney’s father’s outsized revulsion at seeing her in breeches atop a horse is the culmination of a lifetime of neglect. Any affection he might have had for Whitney died alongside his wife — he’s now an embittered widower who feels saddled with a defective daughter. Whitney’s pranks are an obvious cry for attention, but it only arrives in brief, indignant spurts from the man who is supposed to love her unconditionally.

With the arrival of her aunt and uncle, Whitney’s father and her chagrined muse Paul are granted a reprieve. Whitney will return with her aunt and uncle to Paris, where they’ll mold her into a more appropriate specimen of womanhood. Whitney’s aunt takes stock of Whitney like a prized horse, noticing her “gently rounded hips,” her sea-green eyes, her piles and piles of hair. Whitney readily agrees to become a project, ruminating that “under her [aunt’s] relentless, exacting tutelage” she would “diligently learn anything which might eventually help her win favor in Paul’s eyes.”

It’s not just Paul that she wants to win over, though. Her biggest challenge is to win over her father, whose withheld love leaves a gaping wound, and endless yearning. Unlike historical romance hoydens that balk at femininity, Whitney leaps at the chance to reincarnate herself as someone softer and more desirable. Her childish pranks didn’t achieve her heart’s desire, so it’s time to try something new.

The Legend According to Sandy (Derogatory)

“Have you read the original version? I've heard it’s much worse.” - TikTok Commenter¹

When Pocket Books published Whitney, My Love in 1985, the book was something of an outlier. At the time, Regency romances were often categories: shorter, sweeter, less intense. McNaught was more inspired by bodice ripper authors like Kathleen Woodiwiss and Rosemary Rogers, who rose to fame in the late 1970s writing globe-trotting adventure stories with big emotions, outrageous heroes, and a hefty dose of violence.

The violence in Whitney, My Love is legendary, thanks in part to a 1999 hardback reissue. Whitney, My Love was already a door-stopper of a romance, but McNaught whittled down the violent scenes in exchange for an extended ending. This change outraged a few people on an All About Romance message board so thoroughly that they called for a boycott. The most strident boycotter, Sandy, wrote:

“Please don’t change original work. It’s not fair to those of us who supported and helped to recognize this work as a classic. It’s not fair to those who have never read it and pick up the old version only to find out that there is another ‘extended’ version that they should have bought instead.

“Do we want to see this happen to all our classics? Are the author and publisher being fair to us by doing this? Those of us who collect are just about forced to buy this is they want to have a complete set of that writer’s work.”

Judith McNaught v Sandy did not die in 1999. When McNaught spoke to All About Romance again in 2006, they asked her about the reasoning behind the “famous” taming of Whitney, My Love. She responded, “I doubt the revision would have been “famous” at all if someone here, on this wonderful site, hadn’t created a minor uproar with some very dire and highly imaginative opinions about my publisher’s and my hidden agendas and the projected results, should the revised version become a success.”

Those who have only read the new version of Whitney, My Love and have imagined a grittier, more horrifying original would likely be surprised to learn that the violence is only marginally more explicit. Clayton Westmoreland, Whitney’s love interest, is the instigator in both instances: first, he hits her with a riding crop in the original, but in the update he has a change of heart last minute and discards the weapon. In both versions he rapes Whitney after a misunderstanding (McNaught does not agree with this assessment), but in the latter the word “rape” is removed from the text in reference to the assault.

To be candid, I’m writing this portion of the essay to stave off the “Have you read the original? It’s worse” comments that inevitably come with any critique of this book. Sorting through the line-by-line changes decontextualizes the violence, which I’m loathe to do when it comes to bodice rippers. If you believe that depiction equals endorsement, this might not matter to you (and I would also ask: do you apply that standard to every genre, or just romance?), but it matters a great deal to me.

No comment from Sandy, though.

Control

“Did the elegant woman in peach, so crisp and contained, write these steamy scenes?” mused Leslie Sowers in a 1993 article for The Houston Chronicle. McNaught demurred, saying that her love scenes are emotional rather than titillating. Sowers recalled a hostile interview McNaught had on a Kansas City talk show in 1987, where the “host read a love scene from "Something Wonderful" in a very suggestive voice. McNaught says it was one of a few love scenes in a 500-page book that included murder, intrigue and relationships.”

I’m pretty sympathetic to McNaught here, as it’s near impossible to find an interview with a romance novelist outside of industry circles prior to 2010 that isn’t cringe-worthy in this way. McNaught spent five years writing Whitney, My Love, and told All About Romance that she’s “one of a very few authors who finds writing terribly difficult.” After creating a genre classic, it has to be pretty demoralizing to have to be on the defensive for public mockery. The Godfather by Mario Puzo has some exceptionally strange sex scenes, but it’s hard to imagine an interviewer reading them to his face, expecting him to be amused.

“The elegant woman in peach” is a careful framing of McNaught, casting her in contrast to her work with its “torrid, bodice-ripping covers.” Appearance-as-commentary is a common (and tedious) framing device for writing about actresses, but outsiders who look to romance for showmanship often gleefully cast professionals in this same spotlight. In an interview with clinch cover art superstar Elaine Duillo for Illustration Magazine, Gary Lovisi inexplicably inserts that the then 83-year-old Elaine is “still the beautiful, slim, and petite woman she has always been throughout her life.” In Merchants of Venus: Inside Harlequin and the Empire of Romance, Paul Grescoe profiles McNaught’s close friend and founder of the Romantic Times, Kathryn Falk, writing that “her almost pretty face looked a little puffy because of a thyroid condition that had added 30 pounds to her frame.”

In Whitney, My Love, after she’s sent to France, Whitney learns that she can influence public perception. Where she used to draw eyes with her antics, she can now do so with her beauty and poise. It’s a concentrated effort, but to the untrained eye, it’s inherent.

If only we all had that level of control.

Does it last?

The Rape of Proserpina by Gian Lorenzo Bernini

Persephone

After a time jump of five years, Whitney’s potential for breathtaking beauty that her aunt keenly noted came to fruition, and after years of carefully studying how to behave as a lady, she’s finally cracked the code. Whitney 2.0 is a triumph, the toast of Paris. She’s eager to return to England to claim what is rightfully hers. “I love you” she imagines herself confessing to Paul, “I have always loved you. Now do you want me? Have I changed enough for you to want me?”

Her fate is irrevocably changed when she attends a masquerade in Paris prior to her departure. Dressed as Persephone, she catches the attention of a devilish masked man in black. Clayton Westmoreland, the Duke of Claymore.

Clayton/The Devil/Hades is naturally the only one that recognizes that Whitney’s costume is Persephone² (“Venus!” most of the party-goers guess, as though they’ve never been tempted to pull a maiden underground), and with that, his covetous wheels start turning. He wants Whitney for himself, but “he’d be damned if he’d court her in France, standing in line, playing the fop and bowing like an ass.” His plan is simple and buffoonish: he’ll return to England before Whitney and pay off her father’s debts to ensure she’ll have no choice but to marry him instead. And thus, all of the effort Whitney put into winning Paul is neatly thwarted by a suitor who refuses to compete, to try. Round one: Hades.

If you think Whitney meekly accepts her fate, you don’t know Whitney. She resumes her attempts to wrangle Paul into marriage upon her return, this time by trying to goad him into jealousy, rather than shock him with stunts. Clayton is an omnipresent annoyance —a fly, a Spotify subscription with ads— and Whitney is determined to circumvent his attempts to drag her into the underworld, hoping to elope with Paul instead.

And Now, Some Contextualizing

There’s an account on TikTok with a series called “Book Jail,” and if I had the power to delete another person’s account this is probably where I’d start. They seem to have cracked the code for viral success: reposting portions of other videos talking about a book, then taking a violent or salacious scene from it to type out into a list to be “jailed.” The majority of the books deemed incarceration-worthy are dark romance novels, erotica, and horror. (I should note that this account professes to be humorous. Nothing’s funnier than making a viral list of “disgusting” books, in the age of book banning!)

I try to be very careful with how I talk about bodice rippers, because it’s so easy for people to pull out individual scenes to argue that the book is inherently immoral or that it shouldn’t exist. Whitney, My Love has two scenes of violence that linger in everyone’s memory, but when they’re repeated on their own, out of context, it’s with the implication that McNaught herself thinks violence is romantic. (When writing this piece I found a blog that called Whitney a “rapemance.” It’s completely fine to have boundaries around what type of content you’ll read, but I’ll admit the flippant disregard bothers me.)

Before she knows she’s engaged to Clayton, Whitney gets maneuvered into going riding with him to a picnic that Paul is attending. Heralding back to her prankster days, she goads him into riding a horse that is aptly named Dangerous Crossing. Clayton, much to Whitney’s chagrin, is more than capable of riding the horse, coaxing him into an uneasy calm. Clayton croons his victory, and an exasperated Whitney attempts to hit Clayton with her riding crop. She misses and hits the horse instead, and all hell breaks loose.

Clayton’s horse veers out of control and rides off with him, and for a few heartstopping minutes Whitney wonders if she’s killed Clayton or ruined the horse for all future riders. When Clayton returns, unscathed but furious, he tells Whitney that either she let him personally punish her, or he’ll go to her father.

This is, to me, the most heartbreaking part of the scene. Whitney feels like Clayton made her regress into her fifteen-year-old self, the thoughtless prankster. He then threatens her with the man whose approval that fifteen-year-old coveted, but has always had dangled out of reach. “Whitney frantically considered her choice: physical punishment meted out by this man whom she despised, or the mental anguish of reopening old hostilities with her father. Her choice was really no choice at all.”

It’s so telling that Whitney never sees going to her father as an option. He never supported her, why would he care if a man raised a hand to her? Clayton telling her father would be the worst of both worlds, because not only would he not spare her, but the illusion of Whitney 2.0 would be shattered. Either way, Whitney loses.

After Clayton strikes her (in the original version), Whitney apologizes. Clayton accepts without triumph, leaving Whitney confused. She muses that, “to be guilty of a grave wrong, to feel remorse and then be forgiven, was a sequence of events totally missing from Whitney’s childhood experience.”

In the reissue McNaught scrubbed a handful of lines (notably, Clayton striking Whitney with the riding crop) from this scene, saying that they made her queasy. I feel pretty neutral about this change, as the scene functions pretty much the same either way. How awful was Whitney’s father, that she’d rather subject herself to violence than throw herself at his mercy? How awful was he, that forgiveness from a foe could feel so transformative?

For better or worse, Whitney and Clayton have a camaraderie after that fraught moment. When Whitney learns about Clayton’s deal with her father, she plans to thwart him, but she also feels guilty about her deceit. They build a physical intimacy despite Whitney’s emotional withdrawal, and when Clayton leaves for London for a brief trip, Whitney sees her chance to elope with Paul.

The trouble is, like most of the men in this story, Paul is rather disappointing. He has pockets to let and is banking on Whitney’s nonexistent dowry. Whitney, who never stops trying, says that it’ll be okay, that they can live off diminished funds, but Paul’s less than enthusiastic response is the final nail in the coffin. Quickly shifting gears, Whitney decides that Clayton is for her and she seeks him out in London.

The second act of violence is borne of Clayton’s misinterpretation of Whitney’s actions. He hears rumors that she’s still engaged to Paul, and goes to a party to confront her. Once there, one of Whitney’s jealous childhood enemies tells Clayton that Whitney is not a virgin, and that she’s been casually sleeping with men since her return to England. Clayton’s response is swift and devastating: he takes this vicious woman at her word instead of confiding in Whitney, harangues Whitney repeatedly, and then launches an assault to punish her. Does McNaught think this is romantic? Read the next line, and you tell me: “[Whitney’s] belief that he loved her evaporated, and in a blinding flash of sick humiliation, she understood that he had done this to degrade her; his monstrous pride had demanded this unspeakable revenge for some imagined crime.”

Once More, With Feeling

I said in the Reformed Rakes episode about miscommunication that Whitney, My Love frustrates me due to the cyclical misunderstandings. Clayton, “acting off of partial information, takes the least charitable interpretations of Whitney’s actions, viciously punishes her, and then has to grovel.”

What I forgot is that in between Clayton’s big transgressions, Whitney misinterprets him. After they reconcile post-assault, Whitney finds that Clayton dissolved their marriage contract and settled her with 10,000 pounds. He meant this as an apology and a peace offering, but Whitney receives it belatedly, after they’ve started to get back together, and interprets it as an insult.

Angered by his perceived brush-off, Whitney rebukes Clayton and plays the flirt to get back at him. This works for a while, but eventually, Whitney realizes how lonely she is. Clayton has moved on with another woman, and the window for another reconciliation is rapidly closing. She swallows her pride and accosts his family at a dinner party, uninvited. Aided by Clayton’s brother, she instigates a confrontation with Clayton that begins with shouting and ends with a declaration of love. I’m exhausted. I’m exhausted.

This isn’t even the last emotional upheaval, as you can probably guess from my “cyclical miscommunication” complaint. Once they’re married, Clayton finds evidence that the baby Whitney is pregnant with might not be his. When Whitney discovers his assumption after weeks of being mistreated, she’s dismayed once more. “He had accused her of something in his mind, tried and convicted and sentenced her, without ever telling her what crime she was accused of committing.”

Once again, Whitney brings Clayton back into the fold with a roundabout reveal that of course, the baby is his. A beleaguered Whitney makes Clayton promise to never-again assume the worst, and he agrees.

In my last newsletter I roasted Clayton, saying that McNaught’s “tacked-on” (this was rude of me!) epilogue paved over his infractions by bringing Whitney into the Westmoreland dynasty. In the new epilogue, Whitney finds a portrait of Jennifer Westmoreland, Clayton’s ancestor and the heroine of A Kingdom of Dreams. An accompanying note declares: “It was [my husband’s] thought that my name should be engraved on upon the back of the frame so that if my hopes for this chest come about, then you will be able to find my face among the many likenesses of all the duchesses of Claymore contained within the chest. I pray that each of your husbands will do as mine has done. I only wish that I could know your faces.”

Whitney then begins her own letter to add the chest, along with her portrait: “I am Whitney Allison Westmoreland, 9th Duchess of Claymore…”

I was wrong about the epilogue. After Whitney’s Herculean efforts to be cared for, to pull notice, to be loved — after my skepticism and annoyance and teeth grinding, McNaught pulls through with catharsis. In the final scene, Clayton hands Whitney a portrait of her that he commissioned on their wedding day. On the back of the gold frame, it’s inscribed, “Whitney—my wife and my love.”

I’m exhausted. I’m crying. I will never shake this book.

1. I have gotten this comment literally everywhere I’ve posted about Whitney, My Love: Goodreads, TikTok, Twitter etc. The original’s reputation looms large!

2. In an earlier version of this essay I explained the myth of Persephone, which might have been interesting context in the 1980s. In 2023, when Hades/Persephone retellings are at the height of popularity in romance, I figured this might read as condescending. I did get to pull out Mythology by Edith Hamilton, which is a great book I would recommend to anyone.