Whitney, My Love

Whitney, My Love is the first novel published by the American writer Judith McNaught, issued by Pocket Books in 1985. It is connected to her later books about the Westmoreland family.

Whitney Stone is a motherless girl whose father, Martin, finds her energetic ways more than he can handle, and the solution he chooses is to send her abroad with her aunt and uncle, Lord Edward Gilbert, a diplomat, and Lady Anne. She goes unwillingly, having already fixed her affections on Paul Sevarin, a much older neighbour who does not take her seriously, and she spends the years in France being taught languages, dancing and etiquette until she becomes a fashionable and confident young woman. When she comes home, ready to be noticed by the man she left, she discovers that her father has arranged a marriage with a duke who has reasons of his own for wanting it. The novel sets Whitney's determination to choose for herself against a system in which a woman's marriage is a transaction between men, and it is explicit about the costs of being married to a man she neither knows nor trusts.

McNaught wrote several novels in this period setting and at this length, and the book has stayed in print since its first appearance.