A mad scientist locks himself in his tower in the Cornish countryside, until a rakish thief comes to steal his heart. The Lawrence Browne Affair by Cat Sebastian, which came out back in 2017, is a sweet and powerful queer romance set in the Regency era. I’m pretty new to the world of m/m historical romance, but the Romancing the Gothic book club seems to have fallen into this niche lately, and all of our picks have been quite good! This was definitely the kind of heartwarming read I needed as we head into another month of quarantine.
Georgie Turner, a conman with a conscience, has backed himself into a corner. His reluctance to swindle an old lady led him to betray one of the most powerful criminals in London and now he needs to get out fast. When his brother tells him of an eccentric earl out in Cornwall who is looking to hire a secretary, Georgie jumps at the chance to lay low in the countryside and maybe lighten the aristocrat’s pockets along the way. Lawrence Browne, Earl of Radnor, is doing his best to stave off the slow descent into madness that he is sure must be coming. If you ask the villagers, he’s already mad—locked alone in a tower of his crumbling estate, causing explosions with his odd experiments and allegedly practicing dark magic. The last thing he wants is some new secretary getting underfoot and forcing him to engage in pesky social interaction. But Georgie Turner is nothing like he expected. The quick-witted, irreverent secretary with a mysterious past is the first person to make Lawrence feel that he might not be so mad after all—except for madly in love.
The Lawrence Browne Affair is a particularly interesting take on the trope of madness. On the surface, Lawrence’s situation sounds like a typical Gothic tale: an aristocratic family plagued by inherited insanity that passes down from father to son like a generational curse. Lawrence views it as an inevitable fact of life that he will not only grow mad, but violent and destructive, just like his father and brother before him. But Georgie is the first person in Lawrence’s life to step outside this Gothic way of thinking and instead actively engage with issues of mental health. What Lawrence had taken as signs of his oncoming madness, we would now recognize as neurodivergence: he can’t stand loud noises and is overwhelmed with anxiety at the thought of deviating from routines or interacting with unfamiliar people. Though Georgie does not have the language to diagnose Lawrence as we might today, he does recognize that Lawrence’s mind is not broken, just different. Georgie helps Lawrence find workarounds to deal with the aspects of life that are challenging for him. By letting go of this trope of inherited madness, Lawrence is able to finally start taking care of his own mental health and to reclaim agency in his life.
The other particularly Gothic aspect of this romance novel is its setting: Lawrence’s estate in the Cornish countryside, known as Penkellis. Lawrence lives alone in one tower, while the rest of the manor literally crumbles around him. Freezing drafts chill the air of every room, mice scuttle through the debris on the floor, and the moldering books of the library crumble to dust at the lightest touch. The state of decay is actually quite impressive for having built up within only a single generation. But Lawrence’s neglect of the house is nearly total: he shuns which holds bad memories of his family, and he forbids the servants from disrupting him with the sound of cleaning. This Gothic atmosphere certainly contributes to Lawrence’s sense that he is living in a Gothic novel in which he is both lordly villain and victim of a family curse. Georgie’s first step in changing Lawrence’s mindset when he arrives at Penkellis is to start by changing his environment. He begins with his secretarial duties of organizing Lawrence’s papers, but soon branches out to restoring and redecorating the entire house. Meanwhile, Georgie’s mere presence helps remind Lawrence to care about things outside his immediate bubble, and to treat his staff, his visitors, and ultimately himself with more compassion. By the end of the novel, Lawrence has grown so much that he is able to entertain the idea of moving out of his self-created prison and building a new house free of his family’s haunted past. Luckily for Lawrence, this is a romance, not a Gothic novel, so he is able to let go of his baggage without burning the house down.
If you’re looking for something fun and steamy to read during quarantine, definitely do check out The Lawrence Browne Affair. You can find The Lawrence Browne Affair at your local bookstore, or purchase it online from The Ripped Bodice using this affiliate link. If you’ve read it, let me know what you think in the comments! I’ll be looking to check out more of Cat Sebastian’s works, so feel free to drop your recommendations in the comments, as well.