{"id":72172,"date":"2014-06-05T18:17:51","date_gmt":"2014-06-05T22:17:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=72172"},"modified":"2014-06-05T18:17:51","modified_gmt":"2014-06-05T22:17:51","slug":"the-unknown-ajax","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/06\/05\/the-unknown-ajax\/","title":{"rendered":"The Unknown Ajax"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"georgette-heyer\"<\/a>

Georgette Heyer<\/p><\/div>\n

Like most families, mine makes frequent use of shorthand.\u00a0In the case of me and my mother, much of the talk derives from the work of Georgette Heyer, the prolific author who created the genre of Regency Romance in the first half of the twentieth century. As my mother had, I read all of the books in my early teens, and even today, our exchanges are liberally peppered with the idiosyncratic language of Heyer\u2019s novels\u2014or, as she might put it, \u201cRegency cant.\u201d<\/p>\n

Something popular is \u201call the crack.\u201d Exaggeration becomes \u201cdoing it much too brown.\u201d A young relative fresh from the sticks \u201cneeds a little town bronze.\u201d A snob is \u201chigh in the instep.\u201d And our favorite, of course, is \u201cimpervious to the most brutal snubs,\u201d a phrase which one finds\u00a0applicable with dismaying frequency.<\/p>\n

Heyer was a famously scrupulous researcher with a vast archive of materials and detailed notes on all aspects of the eras she portrayed. (In addition to the Regency, Heyer set books in the Georgian and Medieval periods; she also wrote modern mysteries.) Her files contained subject headings like \u201cBeauty, Colours, Dress, Hats, Household, Prices, and Shops.\u201d<\/p>\n

While devotees will argue passionately for their favorite Heyers (mine, not that you asked, are Cotillion<\/em>, Devil\u2019s Cub<\/em>, and, of course, The Grand Sophy<\/em>\u2014I don\u2019t like the May-December jaded-rakes ones) it can\u2019t be denied that there are certain recurring tropes in her work. One biographer defined these as the \u201csaturnine male lead, the marriage in danger, the extravagant wife, and the group of idle, entertaining young men.\u201d To this I would add a mad chase at the book\u2019s end, which oftentimes brings together disparate characters at a remote and random inn. But all are characterized by their real wit, fully realized characters, and utterly satisfying conclusions. (Okay, A Civil Contract<\/em>, not so much.) <\/p>\n

Heyer has been criticized in some quarters for the overwhelming barrage of period detail in her books, but it seems important to remember that in a time before a thousand and one Austen adaptations and the entire genre of \u201chistoricals\u201d that Heyer invented, we had no mental image of this world. She had to recreate it from scratch, and she did. And the truth is, though we take it on faith that the Regency society she conjured is accurate in all respects\u2014and I\u2019m sure to the best of her ability, it was\u2014she largely invented\u00a0<\/em>that world, and I\u2019d imagine that many of her imitators have used her novels themselves as the basis of their research.<\/p>\n

Heyer modeled her work on Jane Austen\u2019s, and in creating her genre, she understood one very important thing: it is the framework of rules that makes these stories work. Social hierarchies, reputations, etiquette, a world governed by understood dicta\u2014this is the framework on which to hang a story. Her books are tame by today\u2019s standards\u2014there is an occasional kiss, if that\u2014but the stakes are real. By contrast, a modern historical will often take the trappings of costume drama\u2014balls, country houses, servants, gaming hells\u2014but allow its heroines to run wild at masked balls, stow away on pirate ships, and leap into bed with whatever duke takes their fancy. It\u2019s not just that this sort of thing is anachronistic (that\u2019s obvious), it\u2019s that it strips the setting of its pleasures.<\/p>\n

Heyer herself took a rather dimmer view of the enterprise. \u201cI think myself I ought to be shot for writing such nonsense \u2026 But it\u2019s unquestionably good escapist literature and I think I should rather like it if I were sitting in an air-raid shelter or recovering from flu.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like most families, mine makes frequent use of shorthand.\u00a0In the case of me and my mother, much of the talk derives from the work of Georgette Heyer, the prolific author who created the genre of Regency Romance in the first half of the twentieth century. As my mother had, I read all of the books […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[7002,3062,12552,14188,14189,14187,3072],"class_list":["post-72172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-genre-fiction","tag-georgette-heyer","tag-historical-fiction","tag-period-pieces","tag-private-language","tag-shorthand","tag-slang"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Invented World of Georgette Heyer<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sadie Stein on the creation of the Regency Romance genre and the author\u2019s view on the enterprise.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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