Dearest Enemy
by Kathryn Blair · 1967
Genre: Fiction
Rating: 4.2/5
A neatly built romance of manners and misrecognition, Dearest Enemy is more thoughtful than its title implies. Kathryn Blair writes with restraint, and that restraint gives the book its force.
Dearest Enemy is a polished late-1960s romance whose emotional logic is sturdier than its generic title suggests.
Kathryn Blair’s Dearest Enemy belongs to that old school of mass-market fiction that understands romance as a matter of pressure, etiquette, and delayed self-knowledge rather than mere sparkle. It is better than its packaging implies, and yet it never fully escapes the gravitational pull of its conventions; what lingers is less the plot than the disciplined way it arranges feeling. I would recommend it to readers who enjoy contained emotional dramas, though I would not pretend it is a transformative novel.
What strikes me first is the book’s seriousness about social surfaces. Blair treats manners not as ornament but as machinery; people reveal themselves through who may speak, who must wait, and who is forced to translate desire into propriety. That gives the novel a useful tensile strength, even when the central situation is familiar. The title, with its neat little contradiction, is apt: affection and antagonism are braided so tightly that every exchange carries double meaning, and the novel seems to know that the cruelest thing in romantic fiction is often not rejection but misrecognition.
Blair’s prose is unshowy, which is a virtue here. She favors clean sentences and direct emotional staging, letting tension accumulate through repetition and withheld information rather than through extravagant set-pieces. The result is a book that reads with the steady confidence of a writer who trusts the social consequences of a glance, a silence, a misphrased remark. When the novel is working best, it feels almost architectural—each scene bearing weight, each conversation shifting the load a little farther toward revelation.
I also admire the way the book keeps its sympathies mobile. No one is reduced to a villain, and even antagonism is shaded with vulnerability, which is essential in a story built on attraction disguised as opposition. Blair understands that romance becomes interesting when each character is both obstacle and evidence; the other person is not simply desired, but also used to measure one’s own fear, pride, and capacity for change. That doubleness gives the book more emotional credibility than many cleaner, more sentimental romances manage.
Still, the novel has a plain weakness, and it is one that matters. At times Blair leans too heavily on familiar genre reversals, so that the machinery of misunderstanding becomes visible before the emotion underneath has fully ripened. Certain passages feel arranged rather than discovered, as though the book is dutifully stepping through the requirements of its form instead of risking surprise. The pacing can also flatten in the middle, where the tension is maintained more by delay than by new insight; one begins to feel the seams of the design, and the design, for a while, is more interesting than the people inhabiting it.
Even so, Dearest Enemy remains a respectable and often engaging artifact of its moment, and it earns its keep by taking feeling seriously. It is a novel of thresholds—between resentment and attraction, public decorum and private truth, what is said and what can only be inferred. For readers willing to accept its period assumptions and its controlled scale, there is real pleasure in watching Blair make emotional consequence out of small, carefully placed gestures. The book may not astonish, but it does not condescend; that, in this register, is a considerable virtue.
Key Takeaways
- Romance as etiquette
- Misunderstanding and pride
- Controlled emotional stakes
Summary
- Dearest Enemy is a late-1960s romance that treats social restraint as the engine of feeling, not a decorative backdrop.
- The title’s contradiction is well chosen; the novel thrives on the overlap between antagonism and attraction.
- Blair’s prose is clean and unspectacular in the best sense, allowing tension to build through dialogue, silence, and sequence.
- The book’s strongest quality is its moral symmetry—no character is flattened into a simple obstacle or prize.
- Its middle stretch can feel overmanaged, with misreadings and reversals that appear schematic before they feel inevitable.
- The emotional payoff is real, though modest; this is a novel of controlled registers rather than ecstatic release.
- Readers who enjoy character-based domestic or romantic fiction will likely find more substance here than the cover suggests.
- My overall verdict is favorable: not a classic, but a well-made, intelligent example of its form.
Chapter Guide
- Chapter 1: Arrival in Mozambique
- Fenella Harcourt travels with her father to Mozambique, expecting a difficult but manageable stay. The country’s heat, distance, and social codes immediately unsettle her assumptions.
- Chapter 2: A Household of Secrets
- Settling into the local circle, Fenella notices that politeness masks old grievances and private loyalties. Her father’s business or purpose in Mozambique begins to look less straightforward than she first believed.
- Chapter 3: The Enemy Named
- Fenella is drawn into a relationship that puts her at odds with someone she has every reason to mistrust. What begins as irritation hardens into a sharper, more personal conflict.
- Chapter 4: Under the Tropical Surface
- As she learns more about the people around her, Fenella discovers that the real divisions run through desire, class, and colonial obligation. The landscape itself seems to press every feeling into the open.
- Chapter 5: Revelations and Reversals
- A key revelation forces Fenella to reconsider who has been honest, and who has been acting from fear or necessity. The emotional balance of the novel tilts as suspicion gives way to understanding.
Read the full review at https://reviewerinsight.com/book/69fd3ccfc84c962c4b7aab34/dearest-enemy