I decided to go alphabetically through my bookcase, so I'm starting with All Else Confusion (Mills and Boon, 1982), chapter 1. One gets an inkling of Betts's views on the verso, where she decides to quote from Tennyson's The Princess:
"Man with the head and woman with the heart:
Man to command and woman to obey;
All else confusion."
Annis, the woman in this romance, is a typical Betts heroine: "although she was moderately clever, she had an endearing dreaminess, a generous nature and a complete lack of sophistication."
She stays at home to help her mother, which makes very little financial sense; the family's strapped for cash, so why doesn't Annis get a job so they could buy some labor-saving devices (such as an up-to-date stove and a washing machine that works)? The other relevant things in this chapter are the discussion of Annis's frail sister Audrey (since Betts mentions Audrey's smallness and timidity repeatedly, you know it'll come up again), and her introduction to the laughably-named Jake Royle, the wealthy businessman and hero of the piece, who is first seen on horseback. He's virile, don't'cha know. Also on horseback is a nice neighbor named Matt - despite All Else Confusion's faults (and believe me, we'll get to those in the next week or so), it's a pleasant change for Betts to mention another man whom the heroine could have loved.
At the very end of the chapter, Annis agrees to stay with a woman she has just met: Matt's aunt, Mrs Duvant.
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I forgot to mention that Annis says she has always dreamed of travel to "Canada and Norway and Sweden and Malta and the Greek Isles and Madeira." I can't remember a book with travel to Canada, but I'm pretty sure Betts sets a book in each of those other locations.
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