To Sir Phillip, With Love

To Sir Phillip, With Love is a historical romance by the American writer Julia Quinn, published in 2003. It is the fifth of her Bridgerton novels, and it takes place among the letters and household of a widowed country gentleman.

The book opens with a letter. Sir Phillip Crane has been corresponding with Eloise Bridgerton, a correspondence that has gone on for long enough that each of them has formed an idea of the other, and his invitation is frank about its purpose: he would like to see whether they would suit. What he has not explained is the reason he is looking for a wife, which is less about loneliness than about the management of a house and two children who have been left without a mother. Eloise arrives unaccompanied, which scandalises the neighbourhood, and finds a household that is nothing like the one described in the letters, and the novel follows two people who have written honestly to each other without saying the important things working out whether the rest of it is worth the trouble.

Quinn's series is built around one large family, and each book deals with a different sibling's marriage, so the letters, the household and the neighbourhood sit inside a set of obligations the reader has been following for several volumes.