"Sweet and powerful and angry and righteous."

I finished Jude Lucens's Behind These Doors late last night (and read the tie-in short story today!) and I'm still thinking about it. This is a lovely book, deeply thoughtful about queer found families, all the many kinds of love, communicating across class and other barriers--where we can't even see how we're misreading situations and other people because we don't understand how our own ingrained assumptions skew our perspective--politics and women's rights, compassion and service. I also wish we would all model our reactions to conflict and call outs/call ins after the characters in this book, who listen, remain open and vulnerable even as they are challenged about their words and actions, and learn to do better. It's inspiring as hell. Sweet and powerful and angry and righteous.

“There are issues of class, of women's suffrage, and of the cause and effect of sensational journalism. I was thoroughly captivated by the characters and the story.”

I'm going to be honest here (not that I'm not always!), but historical romance is not something I normally read. It's completely a personal preference, not anything against the genre itself. I know many, many people who adore it and read it exclusively. That being said, when I saw the blurb and the cover for Behind These Doors by new to me author, Jude Lucens, I knew right away I'd be giving the book a try. New author and a book outside of my usual go to? Sign me the heck up. I'm always looking for new and different books to check out... it's fun to read something not in your comfort zone every now and then, right? So a book that has a poly relationship, class differences, and a bit of politics thrown in sounded like a book worth taking a look at. And boy was I right. ...

"I really couldn’t put this book down, and I’m amazed that this is the first full length novel from this author – I hope there are more soon!"

Wow, I have never enjoyed 300 pages of relationship negotiations so much??

I went into this having completely forgotten and/or not read the book blurb, so I was delightfully surprised when in the very first scene Aubrey’s committed thruple with the Hernedales is made explicit in the characters’ introductions. I love non-monogamous books but I’m not sure I’ve read a romance that starts with a committed polyamorous relationship and adds to it rather than having forming a poly relationship be the core of the story. Lucien shows up soon after the book starts, and when Aubrey is clearly responding to his bold flirtation, the Hernedales encourage him to run after this dashing stranger who caught his eye.

The book is a wonderful exploration of vulnerability and trust in relationships as Aubrey and Lucien commit to each other. ...

"Exquisite historical detail, deftly rendered. ... A love story through and through."
 
Recently, I had the absolute pleasure of reading Behind These Doors by Jude Lucens. This Edwardian polyamorous romance is one of my favorite reads of 2019 thus far.

Here’s a bit of an open secret of many authors, me among them: when we’re deeply entrenched in own stories, it can be hard to wrap our heads around other books in the same genre. I tell you this because – as I finish writing my fourth historical romance in a row and am about to start the fifth – for a book in the genre to turn my head right now, it has to hit all my HEA buttons. And, boy howdy, Behind These Doors does that. Here are the top five reasons I fell in love with this book.

Exquisite historical detail, deftly rendered. The Honorable Aubrey Fanshawe and Lucien Saxby meet in London in 1906. These men are from different classes and lead very different lives. Part of their journey is observing and learning about these overt and nuanced differences in each other’s lives, and understanding the fraught nature of being bi/poly men in that time and place. Of course, as these characters make these observations, so does the reader, which immerses us in this specific time and place.

There are other evocative details woven into the story fabric, from Saxby’s workaday world, his bleak rented rooms, and the women’s suffrage meetings he attends, to Fanshawe’s leisurely life, difficult social obligations, and history of abuse at boarding school. So much great character is revealed through these details without ever hitting an anachronistic note. ...

“A book that ticked all the boxes I wanted ticked in a story about polyamory. ... I appreciated the deeply thoughtful exchanges that occurred between the various characters. An utterly delightful read.”

It’s delightful to have just read a polyamorous story (Badge of Loyalty) and be able to juxtapose this book against it. With this story, I have managed to randomly bump into a book that ticked all the boxes I wanted ticked in a story about polyamory. It’s worth noting that Aubrey, Rupert, and Henrietta’s relationship is on display from page one and Lucens does a delightful job of detailing the dynamic of these three long-time lovers both in public and in private. The new relationship Aubrey finds himself developing with Lucien is then something new and separate from the one he enjoys with the Hernedales, but Lucens provides perhaps even more depth when describing how Aubrey and Lucien react and interact as they learn more about one another. One of this books strongest pluses is the focus on interpersonal scenes. ...

“Once in awhile, you read a book that works to break down boundaries in multiple ways, and with amazing results. Behind These Doors is one of those books.”

Once in awhile, you read a book that works to break down boundaries in multiple ways, and with amazing results. Behind These Doors is one of those books. It has a keen sense of itself, and contains some beautiful relationships, set against a background of political change, and without lessening the effects of class division on the various couples and romantic pairings involved. The various situations in the novel are depicted using language outside the norm. Too often, novels in the historical romance category use the same terms and phrases to convey X situation, and honestly that can get rather old, rather fast. Lucens manages to convey concepts we read about all the time, in ways that don’t come across as redundant. In fact, even for those people that don’t read historical romances often, there are details in this novel that I think they will enjoy.

Lucien having been raised to be in service is a large part of his development, and it doesn’t disappear when he becomes involved with Aubrey. Instead, Lucien, Aubrey, Hettie, and Rupert must work together to overcome their prejudices and fears when it comes to position, and their respective places in society. The women’s suffrage movement, and the various characters’ involvement in it, makes for an interesting backdrop–especially considering the characters must sometimes change their views about one another, based on how the movement develops. ...

"Lucens’ writing reminds me of the best works by K.J. Charles. Highly, highly recommended, and a must-read for historical romance fanatics."

A good historical romance isn’t easy to master. Only a few authors in the LGBT genre have made a career out of purely historical stories, and I hope Jude Lucens is now in that successful group, because this book is wonderful.

Taking place in the strict Edwardian society of 1906, the story alternates between two third-person main characters—Aubrey and Lucien, both of different classes and different temperaments, who want different things in life and expect different things from their worlds. But after the type of fling that would’ve been a one-off for them both, they can’t seem to stay away from each other, and their worlds start to meld in strange ways. Aubrey’s best friends and lovers, Rupert and Henrietta Hernedale, adopt Lucien into their social circle, further complicating their delicate dynamic, and Lucien begins to resent the idea that he’s supposed to want something from an “nob” besides love and affection.

First of all, the relationship dynamics would be unconventional in a contemporary romance, making them even more intense in a historical setting. The first explicit love scene in the book is a fairly domestic bedroom scene between Aubrey, Rupert, and Henrietta that absolutely glows with both eroticism and pure love.  I honestly wasn’t expecting it. ...

I highlighted so much of this polyamorous historical romance that I am frankly annoyed with myself. In 1906 a fancy lord named Aubrey and a journalist named Lucien have a one-night stand that accidentally becomes several nights that accidentally become love. Oops!

“Speak, then, lovely creature.”

Lucien, our working-class hero, is one seductive motherfucker. I mean, goddamn. Give a man a chance, will you? Meanwhile, the noble Aubrey is so awkward and vulnerable, it hurts. This internal contrast to their external positions goes some way to balancing their relationship: emotionally, Lucien needs to coax Aubrey; socially, Aubrey needs to be gentle with Lucien.

"Didn’t it mean something, that a formal sort of fellow used your Christian name?"

The class difference between the pair could’ve been handled so cavalierly, but instead, it’s given genuine thought and respect, which in turn deepens the romance. They have to work in order to learn each other, you know? It is just so… sweet. And meaningful. And I cry every time! Amazing. ...

“Lucens does a great job of balancing the titillating nature of some of her characters’ encounters… and the reality of everyday tenderness and familiarity between partners.”

This is my first time reading a historical romance that features a (normal! healthy!) polyamorous relationship. In an author’s note, Lucens discloses that many aspects of the story are #OwnVoices, and that makes it even more of a delight to read.

The primary story is about Aubrey, a toff, and Lucien, a working man brought up in service. But there are many stories in this story – Rupert, Henrietta, William, Ben, Edgar. And the lovely thing about it is how each character *is* a character. They’ve got their own personalities and motivations. But while there are certainly a lot of tensions between them, there isn’t an overarching murder plot or mystery. That’s not actually a criticism – there is definitely enough in this book to be going on without something like that.

A major source of tension between Aubrey and Lucien is their differences in social class and status. Lucien, having grown up with parents in service, on the edge of the aristocratic world, knows how to fit into Aubrey’s life. His accent is on point, his clothes perfectly pressed, his hair expertly pomaded.  And he is desperately aware that, if he chose, he could play the charade of being One of Them. The same is not true of Aubrey, of course. He’s never given a thought to his own valet, or how being a working man does not mean one is struggling. Lucien is consciously aware that Aubrey and Aubrey’s lovers, the Hernedales (Rupert and Henrietta), have a lot of social status and influence, though it takes Aubrey a while to understand what that means practically. ...

"Incredibly transporting, a very persuasive snapshot of Edwardian London.”

At the start of this book we have an Edwardian-era upper-crust poly trio in a long-established relationship, and one lonely gossip journalist with class consciousness issues. By the end of this book we know a whole ensemble of people whose search for personal happiness and political agendas we’ve had to factor in: members of parliament, militant suffragettes, queer men and women, bigoted family members, snobby newspaper editors, former streetwalkers and their families, valets, footmen, seamstresses doing piece-work, cooks, Boer War veterans, people of color, and disabled characters of both the upper and lower classes. It was incredibly transporting, a very persuasive snapshot of Edwardian London.

That’s not all — there’s a great many other things this book does exceptionally well. Aubrey Fanshawe, our bisexual aristocrat with a tendency toward self-deprecation, is adorable and clumsy and utterly charming. Lucien Saxby, an army survivor turned gossip journalist painfully aware of the gap between his working-class roots and the nobs he writes about, is fascinating as someone who both desperately wants to care for someone and desperately wants not to be depended upon as a servant. The last thing he needs is to get entangled with a whole passel of aristocrats — so of course that’s where he ends up. ...