Letty and the Law

This is witty, rapid-fire romance in a summer mood. Miss Baldwin obviously enjoys her spit-fire heroine and the discomfiture of her somewhat sober-sided lawyer, and with a nice dash she gives us a light modern version of "The Taming of the Shrew."

"Letty McDonald," said Mr. Talbot to the promising young lawyer he had picked to succeed him, "is young and pretty -- and quite a handful. Her father was my best friend, and I'm her legal guardian, but I'm getting too old to handle female spitfires. From now on you'll have to manage her."

"Me?" gasped David Alcott. "I don't know anything about glamour girls."

That was true. All his life David had had but one love -- the Law. Fighting his way from a small upstate town to a good job in Manhattan, he'd had no time for either girls or glamour. But when Letty McDonald -- rich, spoiled -- arrived from Europe, his education began.

The description misleads -- Letty's not shrewish, she's just spoiled heiressish. And she learns her lesson fairly early in the book. Like a lot of Faith Baldwins, the concept here is promising but she resolves the central conflict too early and has to manufacture obstacles/misunderstandings that end up turning it into a different kind of story. Is it (not) "Taming of the Shrew" or (not) "Law & Order"? Also like a lot of Baldwins, it's light but with a sort of bleak undertone -- here, the compromises & sacrifices women had to make for men's careers and how a patriarchal society deprived them of any compensating professional attainments of their own. Interesting for that.

Flags: A cat is killed. This is portrayed as an awful thing. Also, some rather mild ethnic stereotyping (Irish working-class character goodhearted but inclined to drunkenness and fighting).

Not necessarily a flag, but not crazy about the times the male MC feels like spanking the female MC. Why was that a thing in the genre? And why did it persist for so long?