WOMS: Portrait of a Scotsman

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I know I switched things around two weeks ago when I shared my review of Rena Rossner’s The Light of the Midnight Stars in celebration of Purim, but I did promise I would later share my review of Evie Dunmore’s Portrait of a Scotsman.

Here it is.

Let me start off by saying I think it is this book within Dunmore’s League of Extraordinary Women I felt the most partial to, but it might be my bias towards anything and everything Scottish.

As I’ve been musing with the past two reviews of Dunmore’s series, it was in this instalment I found myself more deeply relating to the characters than any of its predecessors. I too easily superimposed myself and my husband onto the text because they read too similarly to us.

My husband is Scottish on his mother’s side; Clan Sinclair. Though, not enough to warrant any clan registration and wear its Tartan, unfortunately. Much to my chagrin. (I frequently begged him if he could wear a kilt with his tallis for our wedding. He refused, and so did our rabbi, who didn’t want him wearing a tallis anyway.)

He is also extremely calloused when it comes to his emotions. A frequent topic of both our premarital counselling and now subsequent marital spats. Furthermore, to continue the comparison between him and Blackstone, he boxed at school.

Where he is rough, I am smooth. Where he is rugged, I am dainty. We could not be more opposite.

And I love that about us.

While before I had be partial to Bringing Down the Duke, in comparison to Scotsman, Duke feels like the fairy tale I fantasized about prior to my marriage, whereas Scotsman IS my marriage [somewhat].

Similarly to Hattie and Blackstone’s story, we have had to traverse many obstacles on our road of happiness. (I don’t say, “To happiness,” because it’s the journey itself that defines us, not the destination. Thus, we are already happy.) Thankfully I didn’t have to go away to Southern France to a women’s commune to find myself, but we did have to “start over” almost.

I’ve shared before about how within the first three weeks of our marriage, my husband suffered an injury which turned into a diagnosis of epilepsy nine months later. The most unfortunate thing for us to have endured as a result is not knowing what married life was, or is, suppose to be like for us without his epilepsy. In a way, it is a blessing, to not have experienced it to then have it ripped away forever, but we did have a blissful honeymoon, at least, which was enough to make me wonder, still sometimes, what our lives could have been like without these unexpected changes.

Like Hattie who comes to terms with herself that Blackstone is not another Rochester or Heathcliff, the men she’s dreamt about from her books, there are still days I grieve over the loss of whatever hopes I had of how my marriage would look.

Not that it looks dire or woeful by any means! It’s just…different.

And through this hardship, my husband and I had to find our way back to each other, which I think was the most difficult, most painful, challenge of all—but find it, we did.

Just like Hattie and Blackstone.

Though my husband didn’t read any Brontë or Austen, he’s done his share of learning what it means to be romantic.

This is why I cannot recommend Dunmore’s book(s) enough. She understands human emotions, their expectations and disappointments, so she effortlessly creates these rich characters whose plights we, the readers, can easily identify with as we go along with them on their journeys, making them more real, more tangible, as though they stood before us in the flesh.

It isn’t all drama and despair until the happy ending, either. There is plenty of humor to be had between the calloused, brutish Scotsman that is Blackstone, and the dainty but fierce porcelain doll that is Hattie, especially when the latter is thrown deep into Scottish culture only days after her marriage.

A solid 4.5 stars, and only a few more months until Dunmore’s next release, The Gentleman’s Gambit! Can’t wait!

Have you read Portrait of a Scotsman? What did you think? Which characters of Dunmore’s series do you relate to the most? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

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