The Simply Quartet in Order

The school is the whole premise. It takes paying pupils and charity pupils in roughly equal number, it is run by a headmistress with strong opinions and thin finances, and its teachers are educated women with no social standing at all. That is a much narrower world than Balogh's aristocratic sagas, and the constraint is what makes the books work.

The Simply books in order

1. Simply Unforgettable (2005) — Frances Allard, the music teacher, snowed in at an inn with Lucius Marshall — and hiding a past on the London stage that she has very deliberately buried.
2. Simply Love (2006) — Anne Jewell, who teaches at the school because she has an illegitimate son and nowhere else to go, and Sydnam Butler, disfigured and one-armed after the Peninsular War. The most quietly devastating of the four.
3. Simply Magic (2007) — Susanna Osbourne, a charity pupil turned teacher, and Peter, Viscount Whitleaf — whose family is entangled with the death of her father in a way neither of them knows at the start.
4. Simply Perfect (2008) — Claudia Martin, the headmistress herself, who has spent the entire quartet resenting aristocrats, meeting Joseph, Marquess of Attingsborough. The book the other three have been building towards.

Order matters here mostly for the last book: Claudia's opinions about the peerage are formed on the page across three novels before she is asked to revise them.

The Bedwyn connection

This is the thing nobody tells new readers. The Simply quartet grows directly out of Balogh's Bedwyn saga: Claudia Martin was once a governess in the Bedwyn household and left under circumstances she is still furious about, and Bedwyn characters appear throughout the four books.

You do not need the Bedwyns first — the quartet explains itself — but the reunion scenes in Simply Perfect are written for readers who have met Wulfric Bedwyn before. If you have the choice, read the Bedwyns first and treat Simply as the coda.

Which one to read if you only read one

Simply Love. Sydnam Butler is one of the most convincingly written disabled heroes in historical romance, the courtship is conducted almost entirely in conversation, and the proposal scene is the kind of thing readers quote at each other years later.

It is also the least dependent on the rest of the quartet. Anne and Sydnam's story needs no setup beyond the fact that she teaches at a school.

If you would rather start at the beginning, be warned that Simply Unforgettable is the most conventional of the four — a snowbound inn, a concealed identity, a heroine who runs. It is perfectly good and it is not representative. The quartet gets stranger, sadder and better as it goes, which is the opposite of how most connected romance series behave.

Where to go next

Straight into the Bedwyn saga if you have not read it, or the Survivors' Club if what you liked here was the wounded-veteran material. The Huxtable Quintet is the next family saga along. Everything else is in the Mary Balogh reading order.