Georgette Heyer

If anything good can be said to have resulted from the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, it is that people once again turned to reading and grown women were forced to fall back on what surely had been a teenage comfort and recall their pleasure in reading the Regency romance novels by Georgette Heyer (1902-1974). Heyer was a prolific English historical novelist who had a loyal following among women during her lifetime and beyond, who arguably created the Regency romance genre that has been exploited by dozens of later (mostly lesser) writers, and whose works remained widely unnoticed after her death. She gave no interviews during her lifetime, although at least one of her books, The Foundling, was reviewed in 1948 by the New York Times, which stated, "Miss Heyer writes cheerful and highly unorthodox historical novels about Regency England, in which people never lose their lives, their virtue or even their tempers". But the tide has turned; by 2022, public libraries had noticed that her books are still heavily circulated, there is a Georgette Heyer podcast, Twitter is aflutter with tweets about her books (including a lively sale of older editions), and Vox declared: "When will Hollywood discover Georgette Heyer?". More than one woman might have wondered how NetFlix, in 2020, could choose to produce a TV series based on books by Julia Quinn instead of any one of several engrossing (but far less sexually explicit) novels by Georgette Heyer.

   See a list of more than fifty Heyer novels (and how to read them for free) on the Works tab of this article.

Regency romance books

Inspired by the social setting of the Jane Austen novels, Heyer wrote more than two dozen historical "romances", mostly set in England's Regency period (1811-1820) or earlier. The predictable social rules of Heyer's fictional world provide a stable canvas for her wildly inventive tangles of household and familial relationships, often about relatives struggling to control children and children struggling for independence, or about people who can't avoid their familial relationships but neither do they feel particularly fond of their family. Each Regency novel has a female lead and a male lead who sooner or later marry and eventually develop mutual respect and affection. Each book has Heyer's signature language: children are offspring, sporting men are Corinthians, vain men are 'exquisites,' and there is likely to be thieves' cant, travel by coach and horseback, and fortunes changed by the Napoleanic wars. Heyer's stylized language, which she meticulously collected and gleaned from historical artifacts of the Regency period, has been widely copied by other writers. But the settings are just window dressing; it's the family stories and the tension of a complex and unlikely courtship that dominate these novels.

Other works

Heyer published a dozen detective novels, which overall are less well-known, and probably less well regarded, than her historical romances. She also published four contemporary novels which have not received much attention, as well as numerous short stories.

Anti-semitism

Heyer has been criticised for anti-semitism, in particular a scene in The Grand Sophy (published in 1950). Examination of family papers by Jennifer Kloester confirms she held prejudiced personal opinions.. Most of the Heyer novels have no mention of Jews, but a few (beside The Grand Sophy, the worst offender) mention Jews in relation to aggressive private money-lending, which is an inaccurate and unfair stereotype.

Attribution

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