From our ducktastic friend, Lynne Connolly:
There are three writers whose complete works are permanently on my TBR shelf, and always will be. Not the classics, but writers I discovered all by myself and then followed slavishly until they died. Yes, sadly, they’re all dead. So I’ll start with the one who died furthest ago. Georgette Heyer.
The Divine Georgette was the only begetter of the Regency genre. She wrote about the Regency when our grandmothers were young or not even thought of and she’s never been out of print since her first book came out. How’s that for longevity?
Heyer started by writing in several genres, historical, contemporary and detective. She dropped the contemporaries, even had them suppressed (they’re okay, but nothing special), but kept on with the historicals and the detectives.
Her first historicals were less-than-accurate Georgians. We’ve all read the romance which could have been set in any period, the details so weird and wonderful that it turns into a guess-the-era festival. Well the early Heyers were a bit like that. Swashbuckling, adventurous, lots of fun. And in These Old Shades, she took the May/December romance further than I found comfortable. Her heroine is legal, but she behaves like a spoiled teenager and her hero is the jaded roué, the Duke of Avon. But people love and adore this book, even now.
I started to love Heyer when I read her first Regency, Regency Buck. Not her most successful book, and one that has one of the most slappable heroines in all romancelandia, but I loved it, drank it up. You see Heyer has that indefinable something – she has a unique and special voice. You can read Heyer in modern writers now, not least because she planted traps for people who dared to copy her. One of the things Heyer is famous for is her slang, but most of it is authentic to the Regency era – except for a few. “Making a cake of oneself” is usually accepted as one of her bombs. Read that in a book and you can be sure that the writer is a Heyerite. She always claimed it was authentic, but nobody has found the source.
In Heyer, you will find every kind of Regency hero and she wrote the originals of all the heroes that came after. And then some. We don’t often find the gentle, unassuming hero in modern Regencies, but we had the delightful Gilly in The Quiet Gentleman. There is the war hero, unknown by his relatives in The Unknown Ajax, the haughty aristocrat brought low by a lively family in Frederica, the Regency leader of fashion in Arabella and the nabob, self-made man in Black Sheep. The rake? The absolute pattern-card, the ultimate rake is Damerel, the hero of Venetia, probably my favourite Heyer.
There are so many Regency rakes now, that it’s hard to realise that he didn’t originate until Damerel strode across the field, disentangled Venetia from the briars and stole a kiss. Then, when he discovered she wasn’t the village girl he imagined, he laughed. And was enchanted when Venetia didn’t storm off in high dudgeon, but shared the joke with him. They spend the book falling in love and when Damerel forces her to give him up, we’re as devastated as Venetia. But hey, it’s a romance and yes, Venetia forces matters and she gets her man. Feisty heroine, sexy, powerful hero. Told with wit and aplomb, it’s irresistible.
Take this bit from the proposal scene in Venetia for great conversation and the most delicious sexual tension imaginable:
“You’d know about my orgies!” objected Damarel.
“Yes, but I shouldn’t care about them once in a while. After all, it would be quite unreasonable to wish you to change all your habits, and I can always retire to bed, can’t I?”
“Oh, won’t you preside over them?” he said, much disappointed.
“Yes, love, if you wish me to,” she replied, smiling at him. “Should I enjoy them?”
He stretched out his hand, and when she laid her own in it, held it very tightly. “You shall have a splendid orgy, my dear delight, and you will enjoy it very much indeed!”
Pause for happy sigh.
You’ve read it before in other books? I daresay you have, but Heyer wrote it first.
She had two hero types, she claimed, the A and the B (can we say alpha and beta?) but she does herself a disservice, as she did so often. Her heroes are memorable and very different to each other. Meet them in a ballroom (please!) and you’d know which was which without having to learn their names.
I don’t write Regencies very often because for me, Heyer did it all. I did want to see the characters in bed, and Heyer, being a woman of her era, couldn’t take them into the bedroom, but when I start to write Regency, I tend to channel Heyer. So I write in my beloved Georgian era instead, where I can see the age without the filter of an author who always dominated the field.
Put me in the “can’t decide” column. I have almost her entire oeuvre in my keeper library, even a couple of her contemporaries. My favorite characters are all from her mysteries, although I adore her historicals. I adore the Verekers from Death in the Stocks.
However, the heroine I’ve always wanted to smack was Phoebe in Sylvester, or the Wicked Uncle. She just had to make bad worse.
:X I’ve actually never read Georgette Heyer- but I’ll add her to my list 🙂
Over at Historical Tapestry we are having a Georgette Heyer Season at the moment, with reviews, guest posts cover stories and giveaways.
Oh no, I’ve never read any of Georgette’s books either.
She’s addictive. And if you read Heyer, you will read every hero of the modern historical romance. Damerel the rake, Richard the Corinthian, Alverstoke, the perfect nobleman, and there are more. Freddy the joker and absolutely loveable hero, Gilly the quiet but effective hero, and more.
She developed them all and she did it all on her own.
I love Heyer! I have read all of her Regencies many times. I have dragged them back and forth across continents, duplicated copies around the world and love them all. I so enjoy introducing her to others. The Grand Sophy is my favorite, closely followed by Bath Tangle.
I am always amazed that I’ve never read Heyer. I’ve got a number of ancient paperbacks sitting on my shelves. I think there’s The Grand Sophy and Venetia, among others. Will have to try them soon.
Lynne, I’m in the can’t decide category, but most often I think of Devil’s Cub as my favourite and Venetia and Frederica are up there, too.
But I think there are significant differences in modern historicals–apart from the more intimate exploration in the bedroom scenes, I like the way modern historicals delve more into deep point of view and give equal play to the hero. Not saying they’re better, just that they’ve evolved. And thank goodness no one is rewriting or writing sequels to Heyers. We have quite enough of that with Jane Austen!
Interesting about the ick factor with These Old Shades. I read that when I was about ten years old and loved it until the man I’d thought of as a grandfather figure married a girl I’d thought closer to my age than she actually was. Later, I grew to love the book anyway, but at the time I was horrified.
And perhaps The Black Moth wasn’t the best book ever written but she was 17 or so when she wrote it. To me, that shows extraordinary talent. I just wish she hadn’t been so dismissive of her Regencies. I have a feeling that attitude masked a real delight in writing them. How could she have failed to entertain herself at least as much as she entertained all of us?
Yikes, you get me started on Heyer and I’ll just keep going. *g* Thanks so much for the discussion. I hope you’ve convinced a few more readers to try a Heyer.
There are some significant differences between the way Heyer wrote and the way we write now, for instance, she made use of the authorial voice, something forbidden to modern romance authors. But it’s all there in her books, the whole Regency genre, with its types and its plots. There isn’t much Heyer fanfic out there, but there is a bit of Heyer slash (I’ll leave it to you to find it!)
But her books have been mined ever since, and now people who haven’t read her are using expressions like “make a cake out of” (one she likely made up) because they read someone who read Heyer!
Thanks for the heads up Marg!
As a longtime Heyer fan, I don’t have much to add apart from a big thumbs-up … but Lynne, Gilly is the hero of The Foundling, not The Quiet Gentleman (that’s Gervase, Earl of St. Erth). Not that I don’t love them both…
The article was great, Lynn. I have read quite a few of Georgette Heyer’s books, but not much about the author herself. The Quiet Gentleman does not ring a bell as one I have read; goody, something new in Heyer for me. Thanks, Elaine