"Day after day, I look for improvement in his skull. An enlargement in his organ for Philoprogenitiveness - that is, the love of children. A decrease to the areas of Exitability, Combativeness and Destructiveness."

[Source]

And ... I´m out.

I´ve got this from a single chapter, just to prove my point:

Poor Tilda cannot help it, of course - it is the shape of her head. When standing behind her, I have noticed a decided protrusion on the right at the baseline of the crown. Self-Esteem, Self-Love, all the selfish sentiments.

He nodded, slowly. What a perfectly shaped head his is, beneath the stovepipe police-hat! Everything in proportion; the subjective and the objective. You do not come across a specimen like that every day. Especially not combined with a handsome face and open heart.

Lifting myself from the bed, I go to my dressing table and tidy my hair. "I shall continue visiting Ruth Butterham," I tell the girl in the mirror. I might find Ruth distasteful, and the memories of Mama´s death hard to bear, but there is fruit to be reaped. I can bring her to salvation, and she can ... give me her skull.

 

[Source]

I get it! She likes skulls.

It took me hours to decide which book to read next and I picked up "The Corset" in the end. I liked Laura Purcell´s writing in "The Silent Companions", I wasn´t a big fan of the plot, though. So let´s see if this novel is going to be a better one.

It starts of with a female phrenologist, who visits women, condemned of murder, in prison to feel the shape of their heads. And tbh, her obsession with feeling the other womans skull freaks me more out than the murderess herself. 

Tessa is a plus sized American who goes on an English TV show. The show is designed to show how people (a Duke and his family and their servants) lives in the Victorian times. Tessa got the job because she was a distant relation to an American who married an English Duke. Max, who plays the Duke, is also a distant relation of the Duke who married the heiress.
Tessa's 1st person narration was laugh out loud funny. But (yeah you knew there was a but!), she was very self-conscious about the size of her body (she is 6ft and a size 18). When it came to Max, I liked the he was attracted to her just as she was. I also liked she was a little older than him (39 to 34). But, the 5 year gap mattered more to Tessa than it did to him. Which was very annoying considering Tessa's husband was 20 years older than her (who died from cancer 3 years prior).
This was a fun, escapist read.
I read this for Romance-opoly Spring square Moon track

No woman in her right mind would consent to wearing a corset for a month. Especially a “skinny-challenged” woman like Tessa. But dreams of being debt-free dance in her head when she gets an offer to appear in a reality TV show. 

A Month in the Life of a Victorian Duke is about real people pretending to live on an English estate, circa 1879. And Tessa's leading man—a real-life Duke—is so handsome she can barely breathe, with or without the corset...