Tender Fury

Tender Fury is a historical romance novel by Connie Mason, published in 1984. Its heroine, Gabrielle LaFarge, has spent her life preparing for a French convent, and the future she is given is a different one.

She is told that she is to marry Philippe St. Cyr, a wealthy plantation owner from the island of Martinique, and she meets the arrangement with resentment and fear. He is handsome and moody, and the surface he presents is icy while what lies underneath includes both passion and violence.

Their marriage awakens Gabrielle to physical pleasure, and she tells herself that her heart is untouched and that Philippe is incapable of love. The two of them spend the novel constantly at cross purposes and are separated by war, which makes the question of what each of them actually feels something that has to be answered at a distance.

The two of them keep their own counsel through the separation, and neither is able to say plainly what the other has come to mean. The book takes its title from the mixture of gentleness and temper in the arrangement, and it leaves the question of whether a marriage begun as an obligation can be turned into something else.