The Proposition

The Proposition is a historical romance by the American writer Judith Ivory, published in 1999.

Lady Edwina Bollash is a scholar of language who accepts a wager that she can take a man from outside respectable society and pass him off as a gentleman within six weeks. The man in question is Mick Tremore, who is blunt, physically confident and entirely uninterested in the manners he is being taught, and the two of them spend the book in a contest of instruction and resistance that turns into something else. Edwina is used to being looked past, and Mick has spent his life reading people who underestimate him, so the lessons go both ways, and the question of what he will do when the six weeks are over is the pressure the story runs on. Ivory wrote a small number of historical romances, and this one is built on the gap between a woman's learning and a man's experience.

The book is set in London, and its comedy comes from the distance between what the two of them have been taught and what each of them actually knows.