Customer Reviews

Georgette Heyer: A Critical Retrospective

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Georgette Heyer gets no respect. Reviled by both feminists and literati, her work has been consigned to a small neighborhood in the literary ghetto that is romance fiction. What a sorry fate for a woman whose craftsmanlike prose, unerring eye for the absurd, and genuine wit have delighted loyal readers for 80 years! Heyer is often compared to Jane Austen, as both wrote novels set in the Regency. This isn't really a valid comparison. Austen wrote ironic comedies of manners about her contemporaries. Heyer--who could sling irony with the best of them, when she chose to--wrote what Graham Greene referred to as "entertainments." Although her historical scholarship was formidable, the world Heyer created in her novels probably bears little resemblance to the real Regency. Heyer is more usefully compared to P.G. Wodehouse, a master farceur who created an immensely pleasant fictitious universe. (I've always been at a loss to understand why Wodehouse is remembered with such critical affection while Heyer is routinely dismissed. I have a sneaking suspicion this is because Heyer's audience is composed mainly of women; her work therefore cannot be concerned with the important, weighty issues that so exercised Wodehouse.)

Mary Fahnstock-Thomas's Georgette Heyer: A Critical Retrospective is a long overdue compendium of articles written about this influential yet underappreciated writer. Fahnstock-Thomas has gathered and organized 50 years worth of book reviews, articles, critical writings, short stories, obituaries, and remembrances into this volume. (Among them is A.S. Byatt's excellent 1969 essay "Georgette Heyer is a Better Writer Than You Think." Ms. Byatt has persistently championed Heyer; I can only surmise that she has been summarily tossed out of the Intellectuals Guild for her crimes.) Georgette Heyer: A Critical Retrospective is a welcome addition to the bookshelves of not only the Heyer addict, but to anyone interested in 20th century fiction and good writing. It is beautifully published in softcover by Prinnyworld Press, a small private publishing house (reason enough to purchase this book--support the small publisher!). Despite her modest claims to the contrary, Ms. Fahnstock-Thomas's scholarship is also formidable. To paraphrase Nigel Tufnel, Georgette Heyer: A Critical Retrospective goes all the way up to eleven.

Georgette Heyer officianados will want this book. I'm talking about those of us who have a complete list of all her titles and notes about the ones we liked. There isn't much bio on this exceptionally private author, and this effort focuses on a history of critical reviews of Heyer's work. But, it also contains several unavailable shorts published in the 1920s, as well as excerpts from the out-of-print 1998 biography of Heyer by Jane Aiken Hodge, and a 1996 print interview with Heyer's son, Sir Richard Rougier, that are worth the price in themselves. Highly recommended.

I was pleased to find that someone had put a book like this together. The author, Mary Fahnestock-Thomas, is a fan of Heyer's and is presumably writing for other fans. She is a reasonably well-organised and thorough fan, however, and produced an interesting collection.

The book is a useful contribution to anyone wanting to do further research on Heyer. It also features material hard to find, or not previously published in the US, including three short stories and several articles by Heyer, and an article featuring reminiscences of Heyer by her son, Sir Richard Rougier.

The reviews are arranged chronologically and treat the historical fiction and the detective novels even-handedly. There is an index, and Heyer's novels are listed both chronologically, as well as alphabetically in appendices.

The author clearly had much readier access to American, rather than to English sources, as so many of the reviews are from provincial US rather than from provincial UK publications. Reviews by nature are ephemera, and many of those collected here bear the mark of hasty and ill-informed readings; some glaring literary snobbism; and some historical howlers. Any reviewer prepared to place a work mentioning the Battle of Waterloo in the late eighteenth century should have been slapped by his or her editor, but presumably the editor didn't know either or didn't care. The reader familiar with Heyer's work can afford the satisfaction of feeling superior.

The scholarly articles bear witness to the growing field of studies in popular culture in the late twentieth century, and it is good to see them collected. Taken as a group with the reviews, the discomfort is apparent of many of their authors with Heyer's skill as a writer, her grasp of her own literary lineage; her historical rigour and her undoubted and continuing popularity at apparent odds with the projected ignominy of her place in popular fiction. The reader feels them wishing Heyer could have aspired to write "serious" work, yet happy she wrote so many of the novels they keep returning to for pleasure. Fahnestock implicitly acknowledges this uneasy middle ground, and leaves it open to the reader to explore further.

An interesting and unpretentious work.

I adore Georgette Heyer and snapped this one up with much anticipatory glee. At last, I thought, someone will give this author the respect and scholarly attention she has long deserved. Instead I found the author gave up on scholarship somewhere around the second page of Acknowledgments and instead settled for a compendium of previously published reviews. Yes, there are several rarely published short stories (although not "previously unpublished" ones, since I had already read them) and a few republished pieces by other authors. Certainly if a newish reader wants an extended bibliography of Miss Heyer's works and doesn't mind the having plot endings routinely given away without warning this book might help set the chronology straight. I can't help feeling cheated by paying for something I could have well researched on my own. The one bright spot is that my disgust sent me back to the bookshelves to read "These Old Shades."

It is normally a sine qua non of reviewing, and one that I have hitherto scrupulously observed, that one should have read a book before reviewing it. However, I found myself skimming large chunks of the present book, and I write to warn you that you may find yourself doing so too.

This is in no way a criticism of the editor; indeed, she seems to have done a painstaking and meticulous job, and just getting all the necessary copyright clearances must have been a nightmare. But more drivel has probably been written about Georgette Heyer than any other author*, and collecting it all together simply doesn't make rewarding reading. What is not unperceptive, illiterate or merely vacuous quickly become repetitive. There may be new insights here, but if so they have escaped my attention.

This is not to say that nothing in this book is worth reading; there are certainy entertaining moments. But if you have read the novels and want to know more about Georgette Heyer herself, rather than what was said about her, then I would recommend Jane Aiken Hodge's biography instead.

On the other hand, if your interest is in literary criticism instead, then you may find this compendium ideal.

*When I was writing this I forgot about J.R.R. Tolkien.