The Essex Sisters in Order

Tess, Annabel, Imogen and Josie Essex are shipped south to a guardian who did not ask for them. The estate is gone, the horse is the only asset, and the sisters have to marry or scatter. Because they arrive together and stay together, the quartet has more continuity than most — events in one book have consequences in the next, and one sister's marriage is still visibly repairing itself two novels later.

The Essex Sisters in reading order

Four novels, one per sister, published in quick succession:

1. Much Ado About You (2005) — Tess, the eldest, who does the practical thing while everyone else does the dramatic one. Establishes the guardianship, the horse, and the tangle of engagements the whole quartet spends four books unpicking.
2. Kiss Me, Annabel (2005) — Annabel, who has decided she will marry money and nothing else, forced by a compromising accident onto the road to Scotland with a Scot who has none. The road-trip book.
3. The Taming of the Duke (2006) — Imogen, widowed young and behaving badly about it, and Rafe — the guardian himself, a duke drinking his way through his own life. The darkest of the four and the one people argue about.
4. Pleasure for Pleasure (2006) — Josie, the youngest, cruelly nicknamed by the ton and painfully aware of it. A makeover romance that is far angrier and more honest about body image than the label suggests.

Read them in this order. Imogen's storyline in particular runs across three books before it resolves, and reading book four first spoils the whole shape of it.

Why this quartet is more serialised than it looks

Most historical romance family series are four independent romances with a shared surname. This one is not. An engagement made in book one is still causing damage in book three; Imogen's grief and the guardian's drinking are set up long before either becomes the main plot; the sisters comment on each other's marriages with the frankness of people who share a bedroom.

That makes the quartet unusually rewarding read straight through in a week, and unusually punishing to dip into at random. If you only read one, make it book one — but expect to want the rest.

The Josie problem, and why book four is the one readers remember

Pleasure for Pleasure is the quartet's most divisive and most defended novel. Josie is the sister the ton has decided is fat, and the book refuses to solve that with a montage: the corset scenes are genuinely unpleasant, the cruelty is specific, and the resolution is about who gets to define her rather than about her waist.

Readers coming from lighter Regency comedy sometimes find it a shock. Readers who have been that girl tend to name it their favourite Eloisa James novel. Either way, it is the reason this series is still being recommended twenty years on.

What to read next

James's larger and more serialised set is the Desperate Duchesses, Georgian rather than Regency and considerably messier. For everything she has written in sequence, see the Eloisa James reading order.