Jo on Heyer

[sartorias]

Over at Tor.com today, Jo Walton talks about why she likes Georgette Heyer. Interesting discussion and comments.

Though I've rambled about Heyer and silver fork novels I still keep trying to figure out why Heyer's more upbeat romances work as well as they do. (The serious ones are really, really awful

Comments

[vcmw]

Somewhat of an aside, but Georgette Heyer wrote a handful of contemporary novels about relationships, in addition to the historical romances, military history things, and the 20s detective things.

The contemporary ones are out of print and very hard to find, and the one I managed to borrow from inter library loan was unspeakably horrible. I love her historical romance, but there are definitely some attitudes about class in her work that showed up even more strongly in the contemporary stuff I tried. It was not charming.

[sartorias]

Yeah! I read these as a teen at L.A. Public, before it burned down. They were very old copies, and wow were they awful. She was right to never let them be reprinted.

[azdak]

Heyer's books are the text equivalent of an Oscar Wilde play, with just enough love, and just enough sex, and just enough wit.There is a brilliant essay by Elfriede Jelinek (who has translated/adapted both The Importance of Being Ernest and an Ideal Husband) that made me totally reassess what Wilde is doing with his comedies - she talked about how the slickly witty jokes upturn conventional values and expose a structural social hypocrisy, and sees in it a reflection of Wilde's tenuous masked existence (I haven't managed to find it on line, but google books pulled up The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe, with the line "In fact, Jelinek conspicuously attributes the subtle ambivalence of Wilde's language to his 'existence in clandestine double life and secrecy', sensing a common denominator that links the author's life and work

[sartorias]

I would love to see that. I reread one of the plays recently, and I thought I detected a certain desperate, almost savage anger below the wit--something about gender politics--but I hadn't time to reread it again, or others, to form the impression into an idea.

[azdak]

I pursued it - it turns out I have the programme on my bookshelf - and I had misremembered. The article that impressed me so much was actually - much to my surprise - by Camille Paglia called "Oscar Wilde and the English Epicene". Although Jelinek is also quoted saying Dialoge im Theater finde ich banal und sinnlos, außer sie sind von Oscar Wilde [...] Komödien spitzen gesellschaftliche Konflikte immer zu, ähnlich Kriminalromanen, die ich auch so gerne lese. Sie sind die Ventile, durch die der gesellschaftliche Druck zischend entweichen kann."

So I think she must have felt some of that "desperate, almost savage anger" you identify.

[sartorias]

Oh yes! What I find interesting is 'zischend', which (I believe) can either mean hissing or fizzy. The one imputes a sly anger, the other the effervescent fun to be found on the surface of Wilde's plays.

I need to look up more by Jelinek.

[fjm]

I am deeply fond of A Civil Contract.

[sartorias]

I like the last couple pages very much--more than most of her endings.

[anna_wing]

I actually found many of her heroes far nicer than the normal run, both then and now. Freddy Stanton in Cotillion, Sherry in Friday's Child, Adam Linton in A Civil Contract, Kit Fancot in False Colours, Gareth Ludlow in Sprig Muslin and many more were all kind, polite, honourable people (some of them were even intelligent). Even the more overbearing ones are mostly decent at heart, and need only the equivalent of a tap on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper to achieve true civility.

As for the characters from the lower classes, I find the range of behaviour among them as wide as it is among the upper (and middle-class) ones. The highwayman Jeremy Chirk in The Toll-Gate is rather charming, and one finds plenty of decent farmers, shopkeepers, maids, governesses, middle-class arrivistes and professional men. Heyer did know the difference between low quality of manners and low quality of soul(see Mr Chawleigh in A Civil Contract).

I support the comparison with P G Wodehouse. Heyer wrote first-class escapist fiction.

[sartorias]

Good points!

[jodel_from_aol]

Pretty much all of Heyer's work that is set in the 18th and early 19th century are quite charmingly artificial. Although most of the ones set in the Georgian era are so artificial as to resemble puppet theater. I tend to prefer the ones set in or around the Regency.

I read a few of the moderns that had been supressed (most were reprinted after her death, althougb I doubt that they got more than one printing, and that would have been a while ago). Only one of the ones I got hold of would have ever got a reread from me. It didn't strike me as all that bad, and it didn't hurt that the 192os seem nearly as artificial a background as her Regency does, but it wasn't *funny*.

I couldn't figure out why she supressed 'Footsteps in the Dark' though. Sure, it's not great, but it's not much worse than some of the mysteries that she kept in print.

[sartorias]

I don't know--I never made it through any of the mysteries. (Not a mystery person unless they are funny.)