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Contents (80)
  1. CONTENTS
  2. ACTING ON IMPULSE
  3. CONTENTS
  4. INTRODUCTION
  5. “A PROPOSAL TO CICELY”
  6. INTRODUCTION
  7. A PROPOSAL TO CICELY
  8. THE END
  9. READING “A PROPOSAL TO CICELY”
  10. “THE LITTLE LADY”
  11. INTRODUCTION
  12. THE LITTLE LADY
  13. I.
  14. II.
  15. III.
  16. THE END
  17. READING “THE LITTLE LADY”
  18. “LINCKES’ GREAT CASE”
  19. INTRODUCTION
  20. LINCKES’ GREAT CASE
  21. I.
  22. II.
  23. III.
  24. IV.
  25. V.
  26. VI.
  27. VII.
  28. THE END
  29. READING “LINCKES’ GREAT CASE”
  30. “THE BULLDOG AND THE BEAST”
  31. INTRODUCTION
  32. THE BULLDOG AND THE BEAST
  33. THE END
  34. READING “THE BULLDOG AND THE BEAST”
  35. “ACTING ON IMPULSE”
  36. INTRODUCTION
  37. ACTING ON IMPULSE
  38. I.
  39. II.
  40. III.
  41. IV.
  42. THE END
  43. READING “ACTING ON IMPULSE”
  44. “WHOSE FAULT WAS IT?”
  45. INTRODUCTION
  46. WHOSE FAULT WAS IT?
  47. THE END
  48. READING “WHOSE FAULT WAS IT?”
  49. “THE CHINESE SHAWL”
  50. INTRODUCTION
  51. CONT
  52. THE CHINESE SHAWL
  53. I.
  54. II.
  55. III.
  56. IV.
  57. V.
  58. VI.
  59. VII.
  60. VIII.
  61. THE END
  62. READING “THE CHINESE SHAWL”
  63. “THE OLD MAID”
  64. INTRODUCTION
  65. THE OLD MAID
  66. THE END
  67. READING “THE OLD MAID”
  68. “LOVE”
  69. INTRODUCTION
  70. LOVE
  71. I.
  72. II.
  73. III.
  74. THE END
  75. READING “LOVE”
  76. THE SEARCH FOR “ON SUCH A NIGHT”
  77. GEORGETTE HEYER’S BIBLIOGRAPHY
  78. FURTHER READING
  79. COMING SOON!
  80. OCTOBER 29, 2019

But looking forty. Whatever that means.

I really like this story. I especially like how bluff, sharp-tongued Helen, alone of all Heyer contemporary heroines, has very real agency: she has decided she wants to marry Maurice, and she single-mindedly sets about winning him in a very determined fashion. Of course, she gets terrible advice from her well-meaning friend on how to accomplish this, because there are always those who will not understand how Different and Special the “not like other girls” heroine is, and will inadvisably try to make her just like everyone else.

It’s practically the law.

But of course Maurice refuses to fall for these tricks, because we couldn’t respect a man who did, nor could we support one who didn’t steadfastly adore our heroine Just the Way She Is.TM

Again: law.

I also like how, in the fear-fuelled future fantasy that is her life, Heyer has recast herself as a darling of the literati, an acclaimed and best-selling “satirist,” not a romance novelist of any kind. It was always evident that Heyer had aspirations beyond the scope of her most popular genre playground – she wanted to be Thackeray, or Dickens, or at the very least Scott. But in “The Old Maid” she gave herself the legitimacy she craved, and even in that flight of fancy, the respect of the kinds of critics who would plague her in real life still wasn’t enough to fill a life she would consider empty without a husband to call her own.

Whatever travails occurred after her marriage to Ronald – up to and including the wholesale slaughter of magnificent, now critically-endangered, creatures – I really hope that she continued to feel that way for as long as they both did live. Helen is brought to life so vividly here that I almost believe she is an alternate history version of Georgette, and I want her to never have felt the need to be “beautiful” in order to be happy.

Actually, I want that for everyone. And I think Georgette would have, too.

“LOVE”

INTRODUCTION

First published in 1919, The Sovereign Magazine was initially aimed at women readers. During its short life (it folded in 1927) it published mainly adventure and romance stories. In its earliest years it serialised swashbucklers such as Rafael Sabatini’s career-making novel, Scaramouche, Achmed Abdullah’s desert romance, Shackled, and Sapper’s The Black Gang, featuring the famous Bulldog Drummond. From 1922 there was a marked increase in the number of “weird mysteries and ghost stories,” but there were also shorts from soon-to-be famous writers including Agatha Christie, Leslie Charteris and Margery Allingham.

The magazine favoured dramatic covers and the edition in which “Love” appeared had a particularly lurid example. It featured a wild-eyed young man about to bring an axe down on the head of a bearded assailant who has in his grasp a terrified and nearly-topless woman. Though the sketches inside the magazine were well drawn and Heyer’s historical short story had an illustration of people in Georgian dress in a sumptuous drawing-room, the magazine’s cover cannot have endeared itself to the author. It is hard to imagine Heyer being impressed with this sort of image and it is perhaps unsurprising that she never had a story in The Sovereign Magazine again.