Books by and for independent women

In Praise Of: Georgette Heyer

Sarra Manning is the author of assorted novels for both YA and adult readers, including You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, Unsticky, and most recently, Nine Uses for an Ex-Boyfriend. In a special guest post, she tells how and why Georgette Heyer won her heart:

As a little girl I loved nothing more than de-shelfing all my mother’s brightly-jacketed Georgette Heyer paperbacks so I could spend hours poring over their covers and ranking them in order of prettiest girl or nicest dress.

When I reached my teens, my mother would desperately try to persuade me to start reading Georgette Heyer, the same way that my friends tried to persuade me to smoke fags, drink alcohol and get off with horrible boys with dirty fingernails. “Just try one,” she’d beg. “Just one. How will you know whether you like her books or not, if you won’t even try to read one.”

Quite frankly, my friends had more success than my mother because I was a moody, sneering teenager who read J D Salinger, Sylvia Plath, William Burroughs, not that I understood a single word of what he was banging on about, and Jilly Cooper when I thought no one was looking. “I hate romance novels!” I’d snarl at my mother. “I’d rather die than read a romance novel.”

Thankfully, I grew up over the next few years. I stopped snarling, my reading tastes diversified to include everything from Jane Austen to Sarah Waters, Nick Hornby to Evelyn Waugh but my mother stopped reading due to a botched cataract operation and a series of illnesses, which left her hospitalised and bed-ridden. The last thing she read, or had read out loud to her by my father, was my first novel, Guitar Girl. She lived long enough to see me finally get a book deal, but passed away before I was published.

And then she was gone and I grieved and every now and again I’d say to my father, “I’ll take Mum’s Georgette Heyer novels.” And he’d say, “You’d love them. You really would. Your mother even made me read them; they’re fantastic,” and I’d be all like, yeah, whatever and my mother’s Georgette Heyer novels were consigned to the spare room where books were stacked three deep on shelves and you had to climb over broken TVs and cardboard boxes full of I don’t know what to get them.

But last year, I had a book cull (it was traumatic, like losing a limb,) and also managed to find space for two more bookcases so I decided that it was time to claim the Georgette Heyers. I liked the idea of having the bright spines of those Pan paperbacks as a pop of colour against my dark green Viragos and my grey Persephones. Just like Noah, I’d take them two at a time each week when I went to visit my Dad…

Once I had the first two home, it seemed kind of rude not to read one, though generally the Regency isn’t my period and I don’t do romances. You hear me? I don’t do romances. My first Georgette Heyer was Regency Buck, I selected it with a sneer curling round my lips; the kind of sneer I could imagine the saturnine hero having as well as an obscenely tight pair of buckskins. The last thing I expected was to fall head over heels in love.

I gorged on Georgette Heyer like her books were an all-you-can-eat-buffet. The first ones I read, Regency Buck, The Convenient Marriage, Arabella, These Old Shades spoke directly to my shameful but bulletproof fic kink, flighty younger girl meets sardonic older man. What can I say in my defence, other than that I read Daddy Long Legs at a formative age?

As I read on, it quickly became obvious that there was so much more to Georgette Heyer than that. These were novels stuffed full of the most delicious, everyday historical detail. Heyer’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the Regency has been much documented (she even bought one of Wellington’s letters at an auction so she could accurately portray his writing style) but she brings more than an authentic eye; she brings the entire period to life in the reader’s mind.

From lavish descriptions of bonnets and buttons and dresses to meals served at coaching inns and banquets. I’ve rubbed shoulders with the Prince Regent at parties in the Brighton Pavilion, raced curricles in Richmond and lost a fortune at the faro table. Bond Street is no longer home to Fenwicks and Fogal and Prada but Hookham’s Lending Library and The Western Exchange.The Pantheon isn’t where the other Marks & Spencers is on Oxford Street but a place where one would be admitted under the sponsorship of a peeress to attend masquerades and masked balls.

I also love the language of Heyer’s books. Not as elegant and refined as my beloved Austen, but a slangy, colloquial flow of conversation that lifts her characters off the page. I confess that I’ve appropriated a “fit of the sullens” for one of my books and a haughty “It does not signify” has become my new “whatever.”

But for me, Heyer’s greatest talent is for writing diverse heroines who can be young or old, headstrong or measured, beautiful or plain but all come with hidden depths. This skill becomes more apparent in her later books where her heroines stop being impetuous young heiresses and develop into older women such as Henrietta Silverdale in Charity Girl, Abigail Wendover in Black Sheep or Elinor Rochdale, in The Reluctant Widow. OK, when I say older women generally I mean older than twenty five and younger than thirty, which would be a perfectly good age for a modern romantic heroine but in Regency times, it meant having “spinster of this parish” printed on your calling cards.

Heyer’s heroines are never passive and although they can’t be modern women, they have a modern sensibility. Annis Wychwood, Frederica Merriville, Mary Challoner et al are independent, lively, questioning, never swoon and don’t have romances; they have relationships.

I suspect that Heyer, like me, found the notion of romance a little unseemly, and these aren’t novels where there are heaving bosoms and impassioned declarations of love. These are stories about people getting to know each other, tolerating and accepting each other’s weaknesses, searching for and finding commonality and liking each other before they even dare to entertain the notion that they may be in love.

I also appreciate Heyer’s ability to stamp all over the tropes of Regency romance novels, a lot of which she invented only to have them blatantly plagiarised by the likes of Barbara Cartland.

Just as you’re settling down for a variation on one of her well-worn themes, it turns out that the rake is beyond redemption and was never meant to be the hero.

Or that our worldly, well-dressed viscount isn’t secretly enamoured of the coquettishly innocent runaway, in fact, he thinks she’s somewhat of a brat compared to the quiet charms of his childhood confidante.

In Cotillion, for instance, Kitty is under the thrall of the devilishly handsome Jack Westruther, but instead of transforming him from rakish to respectable, Kitty realises that he’s a fortune hunting ne’er do well.

The story takes an unexpected turn as we’re drawn into the deepening relationship between naïve, ingenuous Kitty and her silly, dandified cousin Freddie and how it brings out the best in both of them.

Freddie becomes a hero, albeit a very unlikely one, and Kitty grows up just enough that it changes the way they see each other and the way the rest of the world sees them.

Of course, there is a certain formula to Heyer’s novels. I think of it as a Heyer shorthand. Her heroes are always skilled horsemen, who usually have a set of matching greys that are the envy of all.

They dress impeccably without being tulips and have many capes on their greatcoats. Her London novels must include at least one scene where they take a turn around Hyde Park (the Regency equivalent of being papped while doing a Starbucks run,) and a visit to the Almanack Rooms. And always but always there is period costume porn:

“a gown of figured lace over a white satin robe, with short, full-plaited sleeves, fastened down the front with pearl buttons to match the edging of pearls to the overdress… a new pair of long white gloves, as well as new satin sandals, and a length of silver net to drape around her shoulders in the style known as à l’Ariane.”

There’s something wonderfully comforting about these familiar details, like a password to a secret society, and to out yourself as a Heyer fangirl is to be welcomed into the fold of a discerning group of women who aren’t at all precious or possessive of their beloved Georgette.

Which makes a lovely and cyclical sense because I’m reading Georgette Heyer now because of another discerning woman who would be overjoyed to know that her books have found a good home.

Yes, Mum, I’ll admit it; you were right about Georgette Heyer.

Guest post by author Sarra Manning. Sarra’s latest novel, Nine Uses for an Ex-Boyfriend, was published by Corgi earlier this month.