Man's World

Man's World is a Mills & Boon romance by Charlotte Lamb. The novel's premise rests on a widow whose reputation for mourning is a cover rather than a description.

Kate works for a features editor named Eliot Holman, a man with considerable charm and a visible interest in her, and her position is that she does not care. Everyone around her, including Eliot, takes her withdrawal for grief over her husband, Toby. Kate allows the assumption to stand because the truth is worse: Toby treated her cruelly, and the experience has left her unwilling to trust another man rather than merely unable to forget one.

The book's engine is Eliot's persistence in the face of her hostility, which she reads as evidence that he is like every other man and which the novel invites the reader to read differently. Lamb wrote for Mills & Boon for decades, and this is a short, single-conflict story with an office setting, where the emotional problem is a secret the heroine is keeping from everyone rather than anything the hero has done. Her anger at his persistence is genuine, and the novel leaves it open for a long while whether it protects her or simply repeats a habit of refusing help.