Awakened Heart, chapter 1

This is a ridiculous set of tags to have on one post! Betts wrote by formula, natch, but this is ridiculous.
Sophie is a beautiful Night Casualty Sister at a London hospital. Dr. Rijk van Taak ter Wijsma (!) is a visiting brain surgeon. They meet because she gets the heel of her shoe wedged in a gutter. She has two plastic shopping bags in her hands, so she can't bend down to unlace the shoe, because heaven forbid she get a plastic bag on the wet ground. She just stands there in the rain, patiently waiting until the Betts hero comes to free her.
No, no, I'm not speaking metaphorically. This is what happens, really!
This is a first so far in this blog: Rijk thinks Sophie is attractive and good at her work, so he comes over to ask her out. He asks her out, as though they're ordinary people, not a controlling man and a doormat of a woman! She's not thrilled by the idea of going out with him, because he's arrogant about so doing, but still - I'm encouraged by any signs of normalcy in a Betts novel.
Oh, but then at the end of the chapter he becomes something of a stalker - coming over to ask whether she wanted a date was forgiveable (though: how did he know exactly where she lived?). But when they go out for a few hours (the aforementioned, almost normal date - or so I thought), he has found out which small town she came from. He asked a co-worker. Despite this rather creepy invasion of privacy, he's less awful than other Betts heroes I could mention.

Apple from Eve, chapter 3

It didn't seem like it at first, but this is a medical plot. I've tagged it accordingly.
Quick synopsis: Euphemia meets Diana, and learns that Tane has accepted a position as a consultant at her hospital. She visits her sister Ellen, who has met a nice curate whom she'll almost certainly marry in the future. A few weeks later, Tane asks Euphemia to accompany Diana to Spain; Diana is recovering from mumps, and wants to get away from everyone. In exchange for this favor, Tane proposes to let Euphemia and her family stay in her house for a month,which is handy because Euphemia's brothers have a holiday coming up.
Diana and Euphemia have a catty exchange, in which Diana remarks that anyone who weighs more than eight stone seems huge to her. Euphemia looks scrawny Diana over and gently comments,"Not really, just normal" (p. 46). So Diana complains to Tane that "anyone would think she [Euphemia] owned the place", and is reminded that Euphemia does. Hee!
Betts gets very referential in this chapter - when she mentions Ellen's curate, Euphemia reflects that "That sort of thing [falling in love with the curate] happened in novels" (p. 53). Two pages later, Euphemia reflects that Diana "was like the Other Woman in a bad novel." I'll ignore the obvious comment here, har-dee-har-har.

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,