Janet Forsythe

When Janet Forsythe arrives at the Muirs - a lonely farmhouse in the wilds of the Border country - she meets with more than one unpleasant surprise. For Janet, spoiled as a girl and soured by a sudden misfortune, is anxious that the world at large should acknowledge her social and intellectual superiority. And when, after a spell of unemployment, she is obliged to seek a post with people whom she despises, she is determined to demean herself no further than is necessary. But she finds herself in an unceremonious household where her airs are innocently disregarded, and it is here that, painfully and reluctantly, she eventually finds her truer and more charming self. In this romantic novel Anne Hepple gives us a clever but warm-hearted study of a snobbish young girl who suffers and falls in love, and who, after many a hard lesson, learns to deserve and to find happiness.

Published in 1956, this is a bit of what the blog "Clothes in Books" would call high-brow tosh. It's a sort of Harlequin Romance in reverse, where instead of the poor but noble governess reforming a disgustingly snobbish and condescending family, she is the disgustingly snobbish and condescending party, and is so determined not to be imposed upon by her employers that it's a wonder they didn't give her the sack by the end of the first week. She's that insufferable. The tale is gentle, mildly interesting, and very much of its period as the eponymous heroine's unpleasant edges eventually get sanded down by her travails - which are of course made even more unbearable by her inferiority complex. Fortunately by the end of the book she is a much nicer person, and reaps all the rewards a 1950's maiden could hope for.