Magic Flutes by Eva Ibbotson

Beloved children's author Eva Ibbotson also penned a few adult novels. Magic Flutes was one of her notable adult books. It's a whimsical romantic tale of a princess in a castle in Austria and a British dockyard orphan now wealthy financier. Their love of music and the fine arts and their republican disdain for the nobility is what draws them together in the spring of 1922.

Tessa, born Princess Theresa-Maria of Pfaffenstein, has given up her duties and strictures as princess and mistress of the castle to follow her dream of being an ordinary girl succoring the arts. Her motto: "Free for work, for art, for life!" She does this by being the go-fer and backstage hand for everybody involved in the Klostern Opera Theater.

Guy Farne is found abandoned on Newcastle's docks and is fostered by Martha Hodges, who lives close to poverty but has a heart of gold for orphans. This driven hero is highly intelligent and goes to the local grammar school and then on to Cambridge on scholarship. He then goes to graduate school to the University of Vienna, and there he meets Nerine, an English girl at the Viennese finishing school, and falls wholeheartedly in love with her. His first suit is rejected on the basis of his low financial prospects and even lower birth. In great determination, he goes out into the world and seeks out his fortune. Ten years later, he meets Nerine again.

What follows then is indeed a fairytale-like story.

While Nerine is not quite the evil "other" woman, she is most certainly a self-centered creature who cares only for her beauty and for the hero's money. Her beauty, she considers, is a gift to him, while his money allows her to nurture that beauty and show it off to best advantage—to his benefit, of course—in expensive fashions and jewelry. The hero's enchantment quickly leads to disillusionment. His eyes are opened when he realizes that the idea of Nerine he has created in his mind and heart, based on the little he knows of her, is not the real person. In reality, she is vain and selfish and does not care for the hero other than his money.

The better he gets to know Tessa, the heroine, the faster his sense of disillusionment with Nerine. Too late he realizes what he really values. However, as a gentleman of the 1920s, he cannot humiliate Nerine by repudiating her. In desperation, he goes about a—hilarious for us readers—method of making her gun-shy and cry off the wedding. Luckily, she falls neatly into the trap, and hey, presto, the hero and heroine are united for a happily ever after ending.