Bizarre is my best choice for it. I've read a number of the Burnett novels for adults in the past few years and they always seem to take some very weird twists and turns. I read a fascinating biography of her and it seems she did not always have a very pleasant view of human nature.

The titular 'His Grace of Osmonde 'is, I think, meant to be all goodness and purity, a sort of Galahad(whose ancestral seat is Camylott, no less) but I mostly found him rather creepy in his steadfast devotion to the former Clorinda Wildairs. He learns of her existence when he is a young child and manages to fall inlove with her without ever meeting her until she becomes engaged to his kinsman. There is intrigue and melodrama aplenty and much fortuitos (and not) coincidence until it really just began to grate on me and I finished listening out of sheer cussedness.

I also found the reader, whom I usally enjoy, to be a bit of out her depth with a wide variety of mispronouced words that would take me off on a tangent so it took a while with the relistens I had to do. It was hard to tell if it was the meandering structure of the novel or the reading that failed to grab me, I think it was a bit of both.

However, I may just dig into A Lady of Quality for the adventure of it.

A Lady of Quality wasn't my favorite book by Frances Hodgson Burnett-- it's no Through One Administration or The Shuttle-- but it's still a pretty good read, so I was looking forward to reading this book, which retells the events of Lady of Quality from that book's protagonist's husband's perspective. Is the first sidequel in literature? Probably not, but 1897 does seem kinda early for this kind of thing.

Unfortunately, His Grace of Osmonde adds nothing to A Lady of Quality other than creepiness; you learn that Osmonde knew of Clorinda long before she knew of him. I don't really know what this is meant to add, but we learn nothing about Osmonde beyond the fact that he is your typical Burnett male: a fine specimen of manhood with no personality. There could be some potential with Osmonde's knowledge that Clorinda murdered her first lover, but it's completely unrealized. Utterly pointless in every way, and it actually dampened my appreciation of Lady of Quality in retrospect.