For Fans of Betty Neels

Georgina Rodman is prickly, competent, and a little overlooked, and Professor Julius van den Berg Eyffert is exactly as forbidding as that name suggests. Damsel in Green from 1970 is a perfect entry: the formula is already fully formed, the Dutch settings are vivid without being showy, and the emotional payoff is calibrated to a nicety. It is not subtle about where it is going. The pleasure is watching Neels get there.

The 2020 Channel 5 revival of All Creatures Great and Small hits almost every note that Neels hits in print: a professional protagonist who finds unexpected belonging in unfamiliar surroundings, a community of decent people behaving decently, and a central romance conducted almost entirely in glances and small acts of practical help. It also shares Neels's refusal to manufacture drama from cruelty. The obstacles are real; nobody is a villain.

Readers who love Neels almost always love Georgette Heyer, and for good reason: both write love stories where the hero's most attractive quality is that he is fundamentally, reliably right. Heyer has sharper wit and more social comedy; Neels has more hospitals. Venetia is the recommended bridge point. Its heroine is cheerfully self-sufficient in a way that would sit well in any Neels novel, and the hero's grouchiness is deployed with the same loving irony.

Helene Hanff's correspondence with the staff of a London bookseller is not a romance in the Neels sense, but it shares something essential with her novels: the conviction that care expressed in small, ordinary gestures accumulates into something that matters enormously. There is no dramatic declaration. There is only the steady evidence of attention, and the knowledge that it is reciprocated. Neels readers tend to love it immediately.