He Died For Her Twice and I’m Still Not Over It

A dead knight, a modern woman, and a tomb that should not do what it does

Here’s the setup, and I promise I’m not going to wreck the good parts. Dougless Montgomery is on vacation in England with her deadbeat boyfriend Robert and his terrible kid, and within about twenty pages Robert ditches her at a church to go be awful somewhere else. Dougless, alone and crying next to a stone tomb effigy of a 16th century knight named Nicholas Stafford, wishes out loud that a man like that still existed. The statue opens its eyes.

I want to be honest about how insane this premise is, because Deveraux never really apologizes for it either. Nicholas gets pulled forward in time, minus any real understanding of microwaves, indoor plumbing, or the concept of women having opinions, and Dougless ends up half tour guide, half govern­ess, teaching a 500-year-old lord how a modern world works while very obviously falling for him. It’s a fish out of water story wearing a corset, and it works better than it has any right to because Deveraux commits completely. Nicholas isn’t a modern man in old clothes. He’s arrogant, entitled, occasionally infuriating, genuinely a product of his century, and the book makes you sit with that friction instead of smoothing it over.

Why I keep pushing this book on people who will absolutely have complaints

Look, the middle section is a slog. I’ll say it plainly because nobody else seems to. There’s a stretch where Nicholas is adjusting to modern life and Dougless is teaching him about everything from cars to credit cards, and it goes on. It goes ON. If you’ve read enough time-travel romance you’ve read some version of this culture-clash comedy before, and Deveraux doesn’t trust the reader to get the joke quickly, so you get scene after scene of Nicholas being baffled by something ordinary. I skimmed some of it on my second read, and I don’t feel bad about that.

But then the book does the thing that makes people forgive it everything else, which is it remembers it’s actually about grief and second chances and the specific ache of loving someone you know you’re going to lose. Because here’s the catch nobody warns you about going in: Nicholas isn’t just visiting. He’s here to fix something, to undo a historical wrong involving his real wife Lettice back in his own time, and the mechanics of that (I won’t spoil exactly how) mean the book is quietly, the whole time, building toward an ending that is genuinely devastating. Dougless doesn’t just fall for a hot man in tights. She falls for someone the plot has already, structurally, marked for tragedy, and when it lands, it lands hard. That bus scene I mentioned. That was this.

I also have to admit something that bugs me on reflection: a lot of my love for this book is nostalgia doing the heavy lifting. I read it first at maybe nineteen, when “brooding aristocratic man learns to love in the present day” hit different than it does now that I’ve read forty more books doing the same trick, some of them better. Is Dougless a fully realized character or mostly a vessel for the reader’s own wish-fulfillment? Mostly the latter, if I’m being fair. Is some of Nicholas’s high-handedness genuinely charming or is it just controlling behavior in a nice doublet? Some days I think both, depending on my mood, which is probably not the ringing endorsement of “great feminist text” some fans want to give this book, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

What I won’t budge on is the ending. Deveraux built an entire structure just to make that final gut-punch and the sequel-baiting twist afterward hit, and it works. I have loaned this book to three separate friends specifically to watch their faces when they get there.

You can find it here if you want to see for yourself: A Knight in Shining Armor on Amazon.

The whole book is really asking one question: if you knew loving someone would end in loss, would you still choose it, and would you choose it again.

About Jude Deveraux

Jude Deveraux has been writing romance since the late 1970s and has somewhere around forty-plus novels to her name, mostly historical and family-saga romance with the occasional time-slip thrown in because apparently once you’ve written one, you can’t quit. She’s the kind of author whose name on a spine used to mean an automatic library checkout for a whole generation of romance readers, back when “genre romance author” wasn’t a phrase publishers were embarrassed to put on a cover. She writes big, sweeping, emotionally unsubtle books, and A Knight in Shining Armor is the one that seems to have burrowed the deepest into readers’ memories, the book people mention first when you ask them what got them into romance as teenagers.

If this wrecked you, read these next

• Outlander by Diana Gabaldon, for the bigger, messier, more ambitious version of “modern woman meets a man from history,” if you want to commit several thousand more pages to the bit.
• The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenqvist (Niffenegger), for a literary, devastating take on love complicated by time itself, if the ending of this one is what you actually came for.
• Remember Me by Christopher Pike, no wait, I mean A Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics by Olivia Waite, for historical romance that trades the dated gender dynamics here for something with a bit more modern bite.
• Somewhere in Time (the movie, based on Richard Matheson’s Bid Time Return), for the same swoony doomed-by-time premise if you want to cry on a couch instead of a bus.

For your book club

1. Nicholas is arrogant and often controlling by modern standards. Does the book earn his redemption, or does it just ask you to find it charming?
2. Would the ending work as well if you didn’t already suspect, on some level, that this couldn’t just be a simple happy romance?
3. Dougless spends a lot of the book teaching Nicholas how to function. What does she actually get out of the relationship in return?
4. Is the culture-clash comedy in the middle section doing real work for the story, or is it padding?
5. If you could bring one historical figure forward in time for a week, who, and would you actually want to keep them?