The Parish Orphans of Devon in Order

It opens on the strongest hook in her catalogue: a matrimonial advertisement placed in a newspaper, answered by a woman fleeing something she will not name, and a wedding arranged between two people who have never met and both have reasons to lie.

The quartet in order

1. The Matrimonial Advertisement (2018) — Justin Thornhill advertises for a wife; Helena Reynolds answers, and arrives at a crumbling clifftop abbey with a great deal she has not disclosed. A marriage-of-convenience novel with a genuinely frightening second half.
2. A Modest Independence (2019) — Jenny Holloway, newly given an income of her own, travels to India to find a man missing for years, with Tom Finchley as her reluctant escort. The most unusual book of the four — a travel novel about a woman deliberately choosing independence over marriage.
3. A Convenient Fiction (2019) — Alex Archer sets out to court an heiress for her money and finds Laura Hayworth instead. A romance built on a deception the reader watches being constructed.
4. The Winter Companion (2020) — Neville Cross, who was injured as a boy and speaks with difficulty, and Clara Hartwright, employed as a companion. The quietest book, the shortest, and the one readers most often name their favourite.

Four books, complete. The men appear throughout each other's stories as the family they made for themselves.

Read them in order

This quartet rewards sequence more than the Belles of London does. The four men share a history that is doled out gradually, and the final book — Neville's — depends on three novels of having seen him from the outside, protected and spoken for by the others.

The Winter Companion read first is a sweet novella-length romance. Read fourth, it is the payoff for the whole series.

Why the workhouse premise works

Because it gives Matthews four heroes with no inherited status and forces every romance to negotiate class explicitly. None of these men can solve a problem by being a duke. They have money, or a profession, or a skill, and in each case the heroine has to decide what she is prepared to give up socially.

It also lets the series be about male friendship in a way historical romance rarely manages — not a club or a regiment but four people who were each other's only protection as children and still behave that way at forty.

What to read next

The Belles of London quartet is the direct follow-on in the same period. For a Victorian series with a mystery spine, try Lady Sherlock. Everything Matthews has written is in the Mimi Matthews reading order.

Matthews writes a quieter kind of Victorian romance than most, and this quartet is a fair representation of it. If it suits you, the Mimi Matthews reading order has the rest of her work in sequence, including the standalones.