What Book to Read?

I stand by my comment in a recent post that most formulaic romance fiction deserves its bad name. Novels by writers like Nora Roberts might be a step up from Mills and Boon, but you’d only read them if there weren’t any other books at your holiday house and it was raining.

I do, however, want to make an honourable exception for the work of Georgette Heyer, (1902–1974), Queen of the Regency Romance. Her books remain an enjoyable, if undemanding, read.

While her stories follow the romance structure of boy meets girl, there are obstacles to their romance, which are then resolved, they cannot be called ‘formula’ writing in quite the same way as later romances because Heyer really created the formula. In nearly all her books, the hero and the heroine meet, but do not initially fall in love, for a variety of reasons such as other existing affections, disinclination to marry or even hostility between them. Circumstances throw them together, the obstacles are overcome, and a happy marriage results. If, as in The Convenient Marriage (1934), they are married early in the story, convenience gives way to true love. There is also often an element of mystery in the plot which helps to keep the pages turning.

Heyer was well aware of her debt to the great romance writers, Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte. The heroine in Regency Buck (1935), Judith Taverner, is actually reading Sense and Sensibility. (Furthermore, the role of Judith’s cousin in the story is remarkably similar to that of Anne Elliot’s cousin in Austen’s Persuasion.) But her greater debt is to Bronte, in particular her hero, Mr Rochester. ‘Charlotte knew, perhaps instinctively, how to create a hero who would appeal to women throughout the ages, and to her must all succeeding romantic novelists acknowledge their indebtedness’, she wrote. ‘For Mr Rochester was the first, and the Nonpareil, of his type. He is the rugged and dominant male, who can yet be handled by quite an ordinary female: as it might be, ‘oneself’.’

Most of Heyer’s heroes are like this, though there are a few meek ones who ‘find themselves’ during the story. They all tend to have excellent taste in clothes, but are not foolish dandies; they are strong and efficient, and have a good sense of humour. Heyer was aware she was creating stock characters. When faced with a plagiariser, she commented to her publisher ‘Fancy taking the Heyer Hero No.1 model, enigmatic, for your model and producing a lifeless puppet! Why, there isn’t a type that is Easier To Do’.

She consciously used other stock characters too – there is a set of heroines who are tall, have a great deal of character and dominate the plot, while another set are quiet girls bullied by their families. As she got older, some of her heroines got older too, and the young girls in these stories are rather silly. There is often a well meaning but foolish brother. However one of the strengths of her stories is that the villain is harder to recognise than in some genre fiction, with the hero sometimes looking for a while like he may have evil intent.

Heyer did a lot of research into the Regency period, largely into things like dress, food, transport, language and manners. She was proud of her ‘special knowledge’ of the period. One critic, she wrote angrily, ‘says my picture of Regency England is no more like the Real Thing than he is like Queen Anne. He best knows whether he is like Queen Anne, but what the hell does he know about the Regency?’ However the critic probably had a point. Heyer looks only at the lives of a tiny section of the community, and makes no reference at all to the poverty and misery of most of the population, or to the fear of revolution, and harsh repression of dissent by members of the tiny class she does write about. Jane Austen doesn’t mention such things either, but her books are much more rooted in everyday realities than are Heyer’s. Austen wrote about what was around her, while Heyer had to imagine the past – and it is a highly imaginary past that results.

Anyone who wrote stories of such freshness and vigour as Heyer presumably enjoyed writing them. However most of her recorded comments about her writing are self critical. She talked about writing a ‘Typical Heyer Romance for instant sale’ when she needed money to pay her tax bill. She described Sprigg Muslin (1956) as ‘another bleeding romance’. She wrote to her publisher concerning the publicity blurb for April Lady (1957) that ‘the way you’ve avoided the use of such works as corny and drivel is just too wonderful’. Of The Nonesuch (1961), ‘I think it stinks’. She admitted to ‘a certain gift for the farcical’, but no more. Yet readers today are more likely to get pleasure from what she did produce than they probably would have from the ‘Real Book’ she yearned to write.

You can find out more about Heyer here. or the fan site here.