The Undomestic Goddess is a 2006 novel by English Chick Lit author Sophie Kinsella (famous for the Shopaholic series).
Samantha is a high-powered lawyer in London. She works all hours, has no home life, and cares only about getting a partnership She thrives on pressure and adrenalin. Until one day she makes a mistake. A mistake so huge, it will wreck her career.She goes into meltdown, walks right out of the office, gets on the first train she sees, and finds herself in the middle of nowhere. Asking for directions at a big, beautiful house, she is mistaken for the interviewee housekeeper and finds herself being offered the job. They have no idea they've hired a Cambridge educated lawyer with an IQ of 158 – Samantha has no idea how to work the oven.Gradually Samantha starts to learn. She learns how to bake bread, she learns how to slow down. But then her old life threatens to catch up with her. And when it does …will she want it back?
The novel displays the following tropes:
- Abuse Mistake: Nathaniel admits to Samantha after she's been working at the house for a few months that when she first arrived, he and Iris both thought she was fleeing an abusive boyfriend because she refused to explain anything about her life beforehand and was so tense and twitchy all the time. Samantha assures him that wasn't the case, though does concede her job always made her feel trapped.
- Alliterative Name: Samantha Sweeting.
- Betty and Veronica: Nathaniel is the Betty to Guy's Veronica and Samantha's Archie, with Guy being the suave, unavailable fellow lawyer at Samantha's firm while Nathaniel is a no-nonsense Caring Gardener. She picks Nathaniel.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Arnold Saville comes off as an affable Bunny-Ears Lawyer and is the only person who seems sympathetic when Samantha makes a mistake so large it could cost her company thousands. It turns out he framed her for the entire thing in an effort to scam Carter-Spink. It's only thanks to Samantha's knowledge of every legal loophole there is, his suspicious behaviour and Ketterman's efforts that stop him pulling off the scheme.
- Bratty Teenage Daughter: Melissa is Trish's niece, but she plays this trope completely straight by ordering Samantha around and generally being sarcastic and rude, though she does show some Hidden Depths when she proves she is serious about becoming a lawyer and Samantha grudgingly admits her stubborn, inflexible nature would make her an excellent one.
- Chekhov's Skill: Samantha being Good with Numbers proves vitally important in the climax of the book.
- Clear My Name: Samantha makes a mistake that causes her client to lose 50 million pounds. Actually, Arnold is trying to scam the company and put the article on Samantha's desk after the deadline to frame her and get her fired. Samantha then has to gain evidence that she's innocent.
- Contrived Coincidence: Samantha gets on a train in a daze after her big mistake, goes to some random place in the country and finds a house, where she knocks on the door to see if they have any painkillers. Said house just happened to have place an ad for a housekeeper and think Samantha's the girl sent from the agency. Justified, though,since if that hadn't happened, we wouldn't have a story.
- Deadpan Snarker: Par the course for Sophie Kinsella heroines, Samantha has quite the dry wit, though she tends to keep it to her internal monologue a lot since her snarking is usually directed at Ketterman, or Trish and Eddie.
- The Dutiful Son: Samantha points out in an argument with Nathaniel that even if she's made mistakes in her time, at least she's not afraid to try, telling him he's still in the village he was born in and lives only five minutes away from his mother, turning down his dream of opening a nursery because he feels she won't be able to cope without him.
- Every Proper Lady Should Curtsy: Samantha curtsied to Trish because she thought that was what she was supposed to do as a housekeeper. Trish decided she liked it and made her keep doing it.
- Freudian Excuse: It's strongly implied Samantha works so obsessively is to please her incredibly demanding mother and her entire family are enormous perfectionists who think nothing of missing their daughter/sister's birthday because they're too busy at work.
- Hypercompetent Sidekick: Samantha may be a lousy housekeeper (at first), but she's a lawyer and therefore leagues more intelligent than Trish and Eddie. In fact, when some small time lawyers come to the house in an effort to force Eddie into signing suspicious documents, Samantha immediately sees what they're up to and promptly spills tea all over the papers accidentally-on-purpose, outraged at their attempts to rip off her boss. It gets her yelled at by Trish, but she decides it's Worth It.
- Jerkass Has a Point: Guy might be obnoxious and dismissive of Samantha's point of view, but when he tells Samantha that just because she's enjoying the novelty of being a housekeeper now doesn't mean she'll want to do it forever and by that point she'll have already turned down the partnership offered to her by Carter-Spink and regret it, Samantha reluctantly realises he's right and decides to return to London with him. She ultimately chooses to remain in the country when she realises getting the promotion would turn her back into the empty shell she was before and there's more to life than her job, so she goes back to start a relationship with Nathaniel.
- My Hair Came Out Green: Samantha is cleaning a bathroom and accidentally sprays her head with bleach. She ends up with "a huge grotesque streak of greeny-blond" in her hair.
- Parental Substitute: Iris, Nathaniel's mother, not only provides Samantha with lessons on how to cook and clean properly, but also gives her some maternal guidance and reassurance that her own mother was strongly lacking in.
- Person as Verb: Samantha's mother informs her after she runs away from the firm that 5 million pounds was being called "a Samantha", but she put a stop to it.
- The Pig-Pen: Played for Drama, surprisingly, but Samantha is infamous in her office for having the messiest desk in the firm. Which makes it easy for Arnold Saville to slip the invoice in a pile of papers after the deadline to frame her for not registering the claim.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: Ketterman comes off as cold, severe and off-putting at first, but he is the only one to listen to Samantha and investigate the fraud perpetrated by Arnold Saville.
- Rule of Symbolism: Samantha's handbag - she mentions that it's the only thing on her outfit that's colourful, since she mostly just wears black suits. The original handbag was a black one, which her mother gave her for her birthday, only Samantha swapped it for a red one on a whim. The splash of red - a colour associated with passion and vitality - indicates that both these inner qualities of Samantha's are what help her blossom in her new job. It's also a sign that she isn't quite as browbeaten by her domineering mother as she thinks
- Slap-Slap-Kiss: Trish and Eddie constantly bicker and argue with each other, but they are obviously deeply in love despite their squabbling.
-
Technology Marches On: Samantha uses a blackberry, which was an expensive piece of tech in 2006 but has fallen greatly out of use since the time the book was written. - Trial Balloon Question: Samantha, who's a lawyer, but currently working as more of a maid, and the guy she loves hates lawyers.
- Un-person: When Samantha checks out Carter-Spink's website a few months after the scandal, she is devastated to find not only is she not on the employees page anymore, her name has also been expunged from all the cases she ever worked on.
- Verbal Backspace: When Trish invites her hairdresser friend over and decides to give Samantha a makeover, Sam immediately protests when they decide she should go blonde and says she doesn't want that "fake, tarty, platinum blonde" ...before realising both women in the room have that exact hair. She promptly shuts up.
- Workaholic: Deconstructed - Samantha is slavishly devoted to her job and as such she has no social life, barely has any time to herself and lives in a filthy apartment because she can't find the time to clean it. It's only by losing her job that she's able to start again from scratch and forge a new identity for herself and even then, learning to Cutting the Electronic Leash or get used to not rushing around like a headless chicken every day takes a long time.
