Interesting and very well-written, but drags in places, especially in the first part of the book.  Less than the sum of its parts, unfortunately. 

A few things bothered me throughout the story: 

Lydia Templeton and Lewis Durrant are the main characters and are supposed to be crazy in love with each other, and have been so for 10 years. But Lydia turned down Lewis' offer of marriage nine years ago and ever since has pretended outwardly and to herself that she doesn't care about him. Well, no, romantic love doesn't work like that, and if it did, the human race would die out pretty quickly. There is a HUGE, unrealistic deficit of lust on the part of the heroine in this story!  (The book is written entirely from Lydia's POV, so I can't say if there is a similar deficit of lust on the part of the hero.)

Phoebe Rae is the young lady Lydia is supposed to chaperone on a visit to Bath. Phoebe is a beautiful heiress who has decided that she is equally in love with two young men, who initially both appear to be in love with her as well. Well, no, romantic love doesn't work like that - I've NEVER heard of a woman being equally in love/lust with two men simultaneously! Just couldn't get over my disbelief there.

Finally, there is a rather nasty thread running throughout the book of middle-aged women who are absolutely dreadful characters. Even Lady Eastmond, who is Phoebe's guardian and is supposed to be a sympathetic character, is rather manipulative, at least with Lydia, and she has the most tedious conversational style imaginable, which the author portrays at excruciating length. But Mrs. Vawser and Mrs. Allardyce are major characters in the story, and they are both horrible. And there aren't any sympathetic, normal middle-aged women in the story to balance this. So one gets the impression that Lydia and Phoebe, delightful as they are in the story, will end up like this in their middle age, in Jude Morgan's Regency world. Not an edifying prospect.  Also not edifying for the middle-aged female who is reading the book!

Some might say that Louisa and Valentine Carnell have had an easy upbringing: their father told them what to do, think, and say every day of their lives. It's oppressive, but they lead sheltered lives. After Sir Clement gives himself an apoplexy being angry with a groom, Louisa and Valentine hardly know what to do with themselves in Jude Morgan's delightful A Little Folly. Valentine proposes that they live. But first, they have to learn how to live for themselves...

Read the rest of my review at Summer Reading Project.

Epic. Brilliant fictional recreation of the lives of 3 great Romantic poets - Byron, Shelley, Keats - and the women they were involved with - Byron's lovers Caroline Lamb and Augusta Leigh, Shelley's lover and wife Mary Godwin Shelley, and Keats' fiancee Fanny Brawne. The opening chapters also touch on the difficult life of Mary Shelley's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman", a hugely influential book of feminist philosophy. The stories in "Passion" are told from the women's point of view, and in places they are harrowing, but always believable. Morgan must have done a huge amount of research to write this and get all the details and feelings so true. Caroline Lamb comes off very badly in the book, Augusta Leigh (who was Byron's half-sister) not too badly, while Mary Shelley has my complete admiration and sympathy. Lord Byron is portrayed as a fascinating, utterly charming, brilliant monster, while Shelley is something of a monster who fails to see how his ideas and the impulses that come from them finally kill Mary's love for him. The story of John Keats and Fanny Brawne has the smallest part in the book, but was the most emotionally affecting for me. His early death from tuberculosis was such a tragic loss. Note to self - must see the movie "Bright Star".

Wonderful book!  Right up there with the best of Georgette Heyer (and the author owes a huge debt to Jane Austen).

Caroline Fortune is, as her besotted suitor tells her at the end of the book, "the dearest, warmest, most generous and good-natured, amusing, entrancing and bewitchingly beautiful woman in creation."  Her father has squandered all the family's money, so Caroline has to make her way in the world on her own, first as the companion to a bad-tempered, selfish old b**tch, who won't even give her a couple of days off to go to her father's funeral, and then as the long-lost but much-loved niece of her mother's sister Selina and her hilariously obtuse but infinitely kind husband, the village rector Dr. Langland. Along the way she encounters an entertaining collection of characters right out of Regency Central Casting (but not a single duke, thank goodness), although the hero's character is a unique creation, and he is positively scrumptious. Lovely descriptions of Brighton and Bath, and the little village of Wythorpe, where most of the novel takes place, came alive in my mind as I was reading. My only quibble with the book is that there are a few too many convenient, just-in-time coincidences but hey, this is fiction and if the story needs them, so be it.