Desire, Class and Reinvention in
A Woman of Little Consequence

A literary look at identity, marriage, family and belonging in Diane Coia-Ramsay’s historical novel

Some historical novels invite the reader into the past by way of grand events: wars, dynasties, revolutions, collapsing empires. Diane Coia-Ramsay’s A Woman of Little Consequence takes another route. Its history begins at the dinner table, in the marriage market, inside a farmhouse, aboard a train heading north and in the private calculations of a woman deciding what, exactly, she intends to do with the rest of her life.

The year is 1901. Queen Victoria has died, an era has ended, and Amanda Metcalf is about to experience a smaller but no less consequential change of regime.

At twenty-five, Amanda is unmarried, financially secure and living in Oxford with an emotionally distant father whose principal devotion is to academia. Her younger sister, Polly, has already married and moved to the Scottish Highlands. Her mother is dead. Her usefulness within the family home, at least as her father sees it, has effectively expired.

Then comes an unexpected proposition: Amanda is given access to her fortune and told to make her own way.

For a woman of her time and station, this is at once abandonment and liberation.

Amanda chooses to concentrate on the latter.

She imagines a cottage of her own. She considers opening a dance academy. She thinks about poetry. Above all, she delights in the possibility of independence—of being able, finally, to arrange her life according to desires that belong to her rather than to her father, mother or sister.

The irony, of course, is that Amanda’s attempt to construct a life entirely on her own terms soon brings her into collision with someone equally determined to preserve his.

His name is Caleb MacIntosh.

And the collision is formidable.

Courtship as Combat

Caleb is not what Amanda imagines when she thinks of a suitable gentleman.

He is a Highland farmer: tall, physically imposing, independent, stubborn and largely indifferent to the codes of gentility Amanda regards as self-evident. Their first exchanges contain little of the polished delicacy associated with conventional courtship. They provoke each other instead.

Amanda criticizes his manners. Caleb mocks her assumptions. She objects to his occupation, appearance and behavior. He refuses to be impressed by her education or social confidence.

When Amanda declares that any hypothetical husband of hers would require education, a fine home, servants and exemplary manners, Caleb responds by suggesting an elderly, deaf local laird might suit her perfectly.

It is funny because both characters are performing.

Amanda performs superiority.

Caleb performs indifference.

Neither performance survives very long.

Their attraction develops through antagonism, but Coia-Ramsay is interested in something more complicated than the familiar pleasures of opposites attracting. Amanda and Caleb are continually forced to revise their first impressions of one another.

The supposedly unsophisticated farmer has books, intellectual appetite, business instincts and a complicated interior life.

The supposedly pampered Englishwoman is capable of work, risk, loyalty and a kind of emotional fearlessness that unsettles Caleb almost as much as it attracts him.

Their problem is not a lack of feeling.

It is an excess of pride.

The Dangerous Business of Being Needed

Amanda’s most interesting characteristic may be her compulsion to improve things.

A room can be redecorated. A farmhouse can be reorganized. A man can be educated. A sister can be protected. A financial difficulty can be solved. A lonely life can be filled.

There is generosity in this instinct, but there is also danger.

Amanda has spent much of her life deriving value from being indispensable. She cared for her dying mother. She worries over Polly. She enters Caleb’s world and almost immediately begins imagining what might be repaired, modernized or made beautiful.

At one point, even before Caleb has proposed, Amanda is already imagining improvements to his farmhouse and library—new shelving, sliding ladders, carpets, paintings, renovations and investments in the farm itself. The future is fully furnished in her mind before the man who is supposed to inhabit it has actually agreed to join her there.

It would be easy to treat this simply as romantic enthusiasm.

But the novel gradually suggests something more revealing.

Amanda does not merely want to be loved. She wants to make herself impossible not to love.

There is a difference.

And much of her emotional journey lies in discovering it.

The Sisters at the Center of the Novel

The most consequential relationship in the book may ultimately not be Amanda’s marriage at all.

It is her bond with Polly.

At first, the sisters appear to occupy opposite positions.

Polly is younger, married and pregnant. Amanda is the unmarried elder sister who has spent years observing romantic life largely from the outside. Yet Polly quickly reveals envy of Amanda’s financial independence, while Amanda cannot help noticing the intimacy and companionship her sister possesses.

Each has something the other believes she lacks.

That quiet imbalance becomes increasingly important.

The sisters share history, affection and a mother whose influence remains powerful even after death. But they also carry old inequities. Amanda was the caretaker. Polly was allowed greater freedom. Amanda learned responsibility. Polly learned, in certain ways, to rely upon her sister’s willingness to provide it.

Such arrangements often look like love until somebody tries to change them.

Then the accounting begins.

By the later sections of the novel, jealousy, betrayal, marital trouble and long-buried family history have transformed what once seemed like ordinary sisterly rivalry into something far more painful.

Amanda eventually articulates the emotional logic beneath much of her life: she has regarded herself as being “of little consequence” and tried to compensate by becoming useful, capable, generous—better, perhaps, in the hope of being loved better.

That admission gives the title its real weight.

England, Scotland and Italy

The novel is also unusually interested in place, not simply as scenery but as a measure of identity.

Oxford represents Amanda’s upbringing: cultivated, hierarchical, intellectual and emotionally restrained.

The Highlands initially appear to her almost as a cultural affront. Dalmara is colder, smaller, rougher and considerably less impressed by the social distinctions Amanda has grown up respecting.

Then there is Florence.

Italy does not enter the story merely to provide Mediterranean glamour. It is tied to Amanda’s mother, her ancestry and unresolved questions about who Amanda was before she understood herself through the Metcalf family.

When Amanda travels to Florence, the journey alters the scale of the novel. The woman who had seemed out of place in Scotland discovers another family, another inheritance and another version of herself.

Yet the answer to Amanda’s identity is not simply “Italian” rather than “English,” nor does the novel allow geography to resolve the issue so neatly.

Her real transformation comes from learning that belonging cannot be inherited in the same way as money or property.

It must be made.

Marriage After the Wedding

One of the more refreshing choices in A Woman of Little Consequence is its refusal to treat marriage as the end of romantic difficulty.

Amanda and Caleb marry, but matrimony does not magically cure the characteristics that made them difficult in the first place.

Caleb remains proud, taciturn and occasionally exasperating.

Amanda remains imaginative, suspicious, interfering, extravagant and capable of turning an emotional uncertainty into an elaborate internal drama.

The marriage has to survive grief, jealousy, misunderstanding, family interference and the consequences of things said when affection is obscured by anger.

There are moments when Caleb recognizes, belatedly, that he has withdrawn so far from his wife that the ordinary signs of intimacy have vanished. He notices what is missing: her conversation, her attention, the small domestic rituals he had once taken for granted.

This is an important distinction.

The novel is not merely concerned with falling in love.

It is interested in remaining there.

That requires a different kind of courage.

A Heroine Allowed to Be Difficult

Amanda is not written to be universally agreeable.

That works in the novel’s favor.

She is capable of condescension and tremendous kindness, sometimes within the same conversation. She is impulsive. She can be jealous. She has strong opinions about nearly everything and no great reluctance to communicate them.

She is also fiercely loving.

Her mistakes rarely arise from indifference. More often, they come from feeling too deeply and deciding too quickly what those feelings must mean.

Historical fiction has often divided women into familiar categories: the rebellious woman ahead of her time, the dutiful wife, the tragic victim of convention, the clever social operator.

Amanda resists fitting comfortably into any one of them.

She wants independence, but she also wants marriage.

She wants to be loved without becoming submissive.

She enjoys money and beautiful things without pretending not to.

She is educated but capable of prejudice.

She can rescue others and make an extraordinary mess of rescuing herself.

In other words, she is permitted the privilege historically granted far more often to male characters:

She is allowed to be complicated.

The Changing Century in the Background

The novel begins in 1901 and closes a decade later, in 1911.

The passage of those years matters.

By the epilogue, Dalmara itself seems to belong to a world edging toward modernity. Fortunes have changed. Families have expanded. Businesses have grown. Motorcars have arrived. Caleb, once introduced primarily as the formidable local farmer, has become a magistrate, mayor and significant employer.

Yet the most important transformation belongs to Amanda.

The young woman introduced at the beginning is trying to determine what to do now that the conventional structure of her life has disappeared.

The woman at the end no longer needs someone else to answer that question for her.

And this is where Coia-Ramsay brings the title full circle.

After years of marriage, motherhood, estrangement, reconciliation and family upheaval, Polly tells Amanda what the reader has gradually been invited to recognize: her kindness, generosity and forgiveness have altered the lives of nearly everyone around her.

She calls her a woman of great consequence.

Then she corrects herself.

Amanda did not become one.

She always was.

The Quiet Argument of A Woman of Little Consequence

For all its romance, family intrigue, Highland humor and Italian grandeur, the novel leaves behind a surprisingly contemporary question.

How much of a person’s identity is built from the way others have treated her?

Amanda spends years interpreting herself through other people’s responses.

Not enough suitors?

Perhaps she is undesirable.

A distant father?

Perhaps she is burdensome.

A sister who attracts more attention?

Perhaps she is less important.

A husband who retreats emotionally?

Perhaps his love has disappeared.

Again and again, Amanda searches the behavior of others for evidence of her own worth.

Her eventual freedom comes not from persuading everyone to value her properly, but from slowly understanding that their failures of perception were never reliable measurements in the first place.

That is what makes A Woman of Little Consequence more than a story of a strong-minded Englishwoman falling for a stubborn Highland farmer.

It is a novel about the difference between being seen and being significant.

The first depends upon other people.

The second does not.

And Amanda Metcalf, for all the years she spends misunderstanding the distinction, turns out to have been consequential from the beginning.