A Regency heiress in search of a husband can't wait to use more modern dating methods and enlists her two close friends in an unconventional scheme.
A Regency marriage was a transaction with paperwork. Settlements were negotiated between families. A woman's fortune became her husband's on the wedding day, unless her relatives had been careful enough to tie it up in trust. The whole apparatus of the season, the calls and the dances and the introductions performed by somebody respectable, existed to bring the right two names into the same room under supervision. What it did not include was any legitimate way for the woman to go and find somebody herself.
The heiress at the centre of this short has no intention of waiting to be chosen. She resolves to do the choosing herself.
Her two closest friends are recruited into a plan that owes rather more to modern courtship than to anything the period would recognise, and the three of them set about testing it in polite society.
The comedy comes from putting a modern courtship method inside those rules and watching the rules bend without breaking. An heiress had more room to manoeuvre than most women of 1815, and still nothing like enough. The film is fond of all three of its schemers rather than superior about them, and the delusion of the title is shared out fairly between everybody involved, the men included.
Thirteen minutes long, and it moves. No time is spent establishing that this is the past, because the costumes and the drawing room do that in one shot, which leaves the running time free for the plot.
A thirteen-minute Regency drama filmed in England, directed and produced by Nicole Sarah Fry and written by Anita Fry, Jasmine Fry and Nicole Sarah Fry. The same team made The Lace and The Cycling Adventures of Lettice Bly, both also in this catalogue. All three shorts ask what a woman of the period could actually do about her situation, and all three answer it differently.