Something wonderful

Something Wonderful is a historical romance by the American writer Judith McNaught, published by Pocket Books in 1988. It belongs to her sequence of Regency novels and is connected to her earlier book Whitney, My Love.

Alexandra Lawrence is a free-spirited young woman from the country, and the marriage she enters into with the Duke of Hawthorne is not one she has been prepared for by the drawing rooms of London. Jordan Townsende is rich, powerful and used to being obeyed, and the two of them are mismatched in temperament as well as in experience: she says what she thinks, and he treats his own privacy as a right. The novel follows the marriage through the social world the duke belongs to, with its parties, its gossip and its obligations, and it puts the couple's loyalty to each other through a series of tests that require more of them than either expected at the start. McNaught writes in the third person and spends time on both of them, so the reader sees how differently each understands the same arrangement.

The book is written in the tradition of the long Regency romance, and its interest is in the private accommodation that two people have to reach when the formality of a marriage has been settled by everyone except them.