Will The Rake sink or swim?

I was having a bit of a reorganisation of my hard drive yesterday (as you do on a Sunday) and started reading a manuscript I wrote first half of last year. Known to the public as THE RAKE I'd queried it with half a dozen US publishers last July, and been encouraged by getting personal feedback from HQN and Avon. As to the other four US publishers... zip. And it's now 9 months later.

On reading THE RAKE I found it really wasn't as bad as my memory was telling me. It is a Regency romance. The strongest straight romance I'd ever written. (Only one little kidnapping, highwayman incident and a couple more pieces of high jinks and trickery... ok, so it's more like the stuff I usually write!) It was inspired by the story of Jane Austen. Dear Jane was unlucky in love, so I wanted to create a lady novelist who had a similar disadvantaged background but to whom things turned out a little differently.

So, the upshot is that I posted a partial this morning to Robert Hale.

I know their Regency lists are very full, and they are more biased towards romantic adventure and gothics on their Regency list than straight romance, but... well, I'm a fatalist. And I also very much trust John Hale's judgement.

Sometimes an author can't judge her own work, and she has to send it out to see if it sinks or swims. So, I wait with interest to see what happens to THE RAKE and whether the story is strong enough to cut the mustard. I enjoyed writing it anyway, and it's a comedy. But I think it's especially difficult to get comedies taken seriously.