The Wings of the Dove (1997) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

Here's the premise. Kate is in dire financial straits. Her mother is dead and her dad is a penniless derelict. Her mother was born into a rich family, but threw it all away for love. Kate now has the opportunity to return to society, if she heeds the advice and matchmaking recommendations of her wealthy aunt. Only one problem. Kate, like her mother, is already in love with a man who doesn't care about material possessions. This particular man is not a pauper, exactly, but an intelligent, crusading newspaper reporter, kind of a fin de siecle Ralph Nader.

There is one way that she can have both love and money. She concocts a plan in which her beloved reporter will seduce a dying American heiress with no real family. If the plan works, the heiress dies, leaves her money to the reporter, and the reporter marries Kate. That all sounds good except that Kate comes to love the heiress, who is not merely pathetic because of her health, but is a truly loving and kind person. Meanwhile, the newspaper reporter falls in love with the heiress for real.

This should work out anyway, at least by modern standards. I mean, so what? Despite the fact that Kate manipulates the reporter first into then out of the heiress' bed, the American girl leaves her fortune to him anyway. But these are not modern characters. The reporter says he will never take the money, and will marry Kate only if she'll do it without the cash. Kate responds that she'll do it without the cash if reporter boy can swear he still isn't in love with the memory of the heiress as his one true love. He can't.

The James characters are complex. If she can't have both, Kate doesn't know whether she wants the money or the man's heart, and her vacillation causes some twists along the way, including her betrayal of her own plan. If she had not caused the heiress to find out about the plan at one point, she would have ended up with the man and the money, although the man would still have had the American's love in his heart. Again, that's no big deal by modern standards. We now accept the reality of people having loved others besides ourselves. And modern women would probably prefer a husband who has loved another so nobly and purely over one who proved to be nothing more than a scheming co-conspirator. But this novel was written in 1902, and it was then believable that Kate would derail her own plan because she needed to be his one and only true love. The turn of the century was also the turn of these attitudes into modern one. If the story took place 25 years earlier, in 1877, a plot like Kate's would be considered utterly diabolical. James probably could not even have published the story at that time. On the other hand, if the story took place 25 years later, in flapper-era 1927, the sophisticated readers would have wondered, as we do, why the hell Kate screwed up her own plan. But Kate does not belong to either of those eras, she's trapped between Victorian conventionalism and modern pragmatism, and her muddled motivations make perfect sense in that context.

So all three characters left the unpleasant side of their arrangement largely unremarked, and pretended that everything was as it seemed to be.

At least for a while.