Priscilla Harrowby was a secondary character in Schroeder’s series of books detailing the experiences of three of Florence Nightingale’s nurses. She was pretty and shallow and spoiled. She treated her cousin Lucinda, a family dependent, very shabbily. Priscilla had no seeming purpose in life but to make an eligible marriage. Her equally shallow mother had seen to that.

As this story opens, Priscilla seems to have changed not a wit. To quote the first lines of the novel: “It wasn’t fair. That was all there was to it. It simply wasn’t fair that her dreary cousin Lucinda should marry a rich and handsome man who adored her, while she, Priscilla Harrowby, with her blond hair and her china blue eyes, should languish unmarried at the advanced age of twenty. Not only was she prettier, Priscilla thought, her face a thundercloud of resentment, but she was an heiress while Lucinda hadn’t a penny to bless herself with.”

Well, thought I, this is our heroine? Good lord, what have I gotten myself into? But I shouldn’t have worried. By the time the book was finished, Priscilla had grown up, learned to think for herself, and become a thoroughly admirable young woman. And I believed in her transformation.

Love, of course, had something to do with it. One evening, at her cousin’s home, Priscilla meets the American Nick Cannon, a business associate of Lucinda’s husband. Nick is immediately struck by Priscilla’s beauty but fortunately, he has never seen her in her guise of vacuous debutante on the make. Rather, he treats her as a rational human being and, to her own amazement, she responds in kind. As she spends more time with Nick, she begins to discover that she is more than her blond hair, blue eyes, fortune and frilly dresses. In the company of a man who has little time for the frivolities and foolishness of society, she can step back from her world and question the “truths” that her ambitious and overbearing mother has drummed into her head.

Nick is not simply an American businessman. (Are heroes ever such?) Rather he is the scion of a noble family whose father had emigrated to America when the proud Marquess of Bellingham had rejected his Scots wife. Nick has come to England to try to mend the rift. Imagine his shock when his grandfather greets him with open arms as the probable heir to the title and the fortune. Invited to Bellingham Place for Christmas, Nick insists that Lucinda, her husband and Priscilla accompany him. He also makes sure that Mrs. Harrowby stays in London.

Away from her mother, Priscilla discovers her own worth as a person. She and Nick also discover love. But fate and Mrs. Harrowby conspire to separate the two lovers and Priscilla’s comfortable life is threatened. Priscilla, rather than bemoaning her fate, rises to the occasion.

Readers should know that there is a “big misunderstanding” element to the story. However, it does not seem forced but rather an all too natural result of Mrs. Harrowby’s machinations.

In a sense, A Merry Little Christmas is about growing up. By the end of the story, Priscilla has emerged from the cocoon her mother wove around her and become the person that previously only Nick perceived beneath her fashionable veneer. By the time I finished the book, I found myself rooting for Priscilla. Considering my previous low opinion of this character, I can only conclude that Schroeder did an impressive job of taking an unlikable woman and turning her into a real heroine.

--Jean Mason