mad apologies!

I've been unable to find my copy of Britannia All at Sea for months now, so I finally unbent and did the thing I'd promised myself I'd never do: bought it online. Before now, I'd always gotten my Bettses in person, either through friends or through lucky finds at used bookstores. This took all the serendipity out of it, but it was driving me crazy not to blog. So as soon as I read the next chapter, I'll post - which should be funny, because I barely remember the plot! I'm sure it will come back to me.

plots

So. I've just finished blogging about the first Betts on my list, so now it's time for me to work out names for the various plots. All Else Confusion is certainly the basic marriage of convenience. There's the slight twist that Jake doesn't realize he's in love with Annis straight away, and Annis has at least a chance of happiness with Matt, but that's it. The marriage of convenience nearly always has at least one of them in love from the get-go, it always features a shopping spree (though there's one book, which I might be misremembering, in which the hero pretends he's poor. It sounds so unlikely for a Betts that I'll assume I'm wrong for the moment).
There's also the helpless woman plot, in which the hero finds the heroine a series of jobs - or, occasionally, she finds them herself - and despite living almost hand-to-mouth, she spends most of her surplus income on jersey dresses and two-piece outfits. That comes in handy when the hero falls in love with her, of course, but it's hardly a sound financial strategy. Of course, because she's of good family, she rarely takes a job as a maid - though that does happen. And she never goes off to get training, or live on the dole for a while until she is trained for a career. Or go to university - Betts heroines are never, ever university girls. Occasionally, the heroine has her own business - I'm reminded of a Betts heroine who owns a teashop and never makes any money, which makes her a suitable candidate for rescue by the hero.
Sometimes the helpless woman plot is combined with the marriage of convenience, or with the fabulously over-the-top ungrateful family (exemplified in the book where her selfish sister doses some babies with sleeping pills so she can go to a fashion show, if memory serves me correctly). The ungrateful family plot is where one is most likely to find a Betts heroine doing work that's "below her station", such as cleaning houses, because she works and works just so her family can buy chocolates. Extravagantly. More rarely, the Betts heroine is the older sister and caretaker of her siblings.
The inappropriate fiancee plot is a favorite as well. The heroines rarely have interesting fiancees (they tend to be dull but worthy), but the hero's fiancee is nearly always thin, attractively dressed, selfish and mean. They make for interesting reading - I'm speaking on the Betts scale of interesting, of course. Funnily enough, the Betts heroines can be just as catty as the mean fiancees when provoked, but the hero always realizes the sterling worth of the heroine and persuades the fiancee to break the engagement. Often, she finds solace in the arms of an American - rich Americans, or overly friendly ones, are the only people from the States who ever show up in the books.
The medical plot can be combined with the inappropriate fiancee plot or the ungrateful family plot (as in the example with the sleeping pills above), but basically it's your doctor-nurse cliche. They work in the same medical setting, and through a series of dramatic events they realize they're right for each other,

labels I might use

I've been turning some labels over in my head, so I thought I'd put them out here for people to see:
waif, his employee, Bentley, other car, shopping spree, poor gentry, wedding, natural disaster, rescued pet, not a doctor, doctor, nurse, jolie laide, beautiful, Dutchman, Englishman, jealousy.
ETA: in love, chapter 10
ETA: proposal, his fiancee, her fiancee, house #1, house #2, house #3
I'm sure there are more, but that's a short list. For example, I'll have to add - and think of names or numbers for - the three or four different plots Betts uses.

welcome to my new blog!

I've been blogging here for a few years, but I wanted to try this as a separate experiment. For years - really, almost a decade - I'd been trying to think of a format that would allow me to chatter about Betty Neels's romances (which I like, and love to mock) and also allow me to sort them into reasonable categories. See, for those who have never read her books, she wrote over 100 books for Harlequin (well, Mills and Boon). They have the same three or four plots over and over, and I wanted a way to chart them. I hadn't worked out a way to do it (and to be honest, I hadn't been trying very hard to find one), until I saw another blogger's tags the other day, and realized they could do what I want.
So what I plan to do is blog about a chapter of a Betts book every day until I run out of them. I don't own every single one - there are ten or so that I'm missing. Which, yes, means I own about 100 similar romances by the same author. They're strangely compelling, taken as a body - all those English women with jersey dresses and long hair marrying (nearly always) laconic Dutch doctors who are tall, with fair greying hair and very expensive cars and houses. Yes, houses - Betts doctors nearly always have more than one house.