Emily Fox-Seton is a 30-something spinster in Edwardian London, well-bred and impossibly good-natured but penniless. She ekes out a living as a kind of genteel fixer for upper-class women, who pay her a pittance or in cast-off clothes. Emily unexpectedly gets an invitation to a week-long country house party, and given the genre and the book title, I don't think it's a spoiler to say that by the end of it she's had her Cinderella glow-up. Frances Hodgson Burnett's writing is wildly sentimental and predictable, of course, but there are just enough veiled comments about the characters and how society treats women as disposable to stop this from being unbearably saccharine.

I did find it dryly amusing that one female character was desperate to get married because if she didn't, a dire fate awaited her: having to go live in Ireland. Gasp!

(I read an edition containing only the first book, The Making of a Marchioness, and not its sequel, The Methods of Lady Walderhurst. Judging by other reviews, that was probably a good choice; the sequel takes a turn into racist melodrama.) ( )

I have read Burnett's Secret Garden before and thought this book was going to be sweet fluff. However, I was pleasantly surprised as the book progressed. It's definitely a story of good vs. evil and the power of positivity. Loved this book! A veiled criticism of Victorian society. I listened to this on audio and the narrator was superb. 8 hours 10 mins (252 pages). It's only 99 cents on Kindle currently! ( )

I'm inclined to say this book was pleasant, though nothing fabulous, except that the Victorian racism towards non-Europeans (in this case Indians) pervades the last third of the book and is troubling. Even without that, this is really just a very marginal book. ( )

Definitely not a favorite, too saccharine and just not up to my expectations. Just found out, though that ITV (which was behind the most recent adaptations of Persuasion and Northanger Abbey) has commissioned a TV movie of it. Sounds like they're going to change the plot somewhat. Wonder if it'll be more likeable than the book. Now, what I'd really love to see is an adaptation of Burnett's totally wonderful book The Shuttle. ( )

The Stein and Day reprint of The Making of a Marchioness was my introduction to that title. I had bought a vintage edition of the sequel, The Methods of Lady Walderhurst almost four years earlier, but waited to get a copy of the first book. (Why did I have to wait so long? This was back before the Internet, when we who weren't rich enough to commission others to find us out-of-print books had to depend upon finding them in used bookstores we visited in person.)

When I finished this reprint, I eagerly picked up the sequel and started reading. That's when I discovered that the reprint's 'part two' was the sequel.

This edition does not reprint the four illustrations each or the fancy page decorations that appeared in the original Frederick A. Stokes Company editions. ( )