Okay, I confess: I am not attending the Jane Austen Festival purely out of love for one of the greatest novelists in the history of the English language. I’m also driven by a deep and abiding love of the Regency romance.
Of course, there’s an entire wing of the publishing business dedicated to fiction somehow involving Austen. Sequels, rewritings whether straight or from the servants’ perspectives or with zombies, books starring Jane herself—you name it, somebody’s tried it. The Regency romance is something different. It’s a thriving variety of historical fiction set during or adjacent to the nine-year period from 1811 to 1820, when King George III was deemed incapable of ruling the United Kingdom, and his son was appointed to act in his stead. Not only did it see the publication of Austen’s novels but also the end of the Napoleonic War. It’s the moment when the eighteenth century slipped into the nineteenth, Georgian transitioning to Victorian. And over the last sixty years or so, it’s a setting that romance readers and writers have revisited again and again.
A Regency habit gives you a weirdly detailed level of knowledge about a very short, very specific slice of British history. You know that Hessians are riding boots that always seem to gleam, and you know that even Wellington himself can’t get into Almack’s wearing them, and you know that Almack’s is an assembly room where marriageable misses are paraded about by their matchmaking mamas. You go riding in Hyde Park, and and you go to Gretna Green for an elopement, and you go to Tattersall’s for horses—but only if you’re a man, of course.
But how, exactly, did this period become such a hallmark of the romance genre? The Regency was Jane Austen’s time, but it’s not a straight line from Pride and Prejudice to the modern-day paperbacks.
Austen, of course, was describing with her sharp eye a very specific slice of her own time. But it didn’t take long for her era to become a stock literary setting, providing fodder for the “Silver Fork” novels of the 1830s and Thackery’s Vanity Fair. It took Georgette Heyer to turn the Regency the period into the Regency the subgenre.
Heyer was born in Wimbledon in 1902. She published her first book—the rollicking Scarlet Pimpernel-style The Black Moth—at nineteen. She’d written it to entertain a sick younger brother, but her father helped her sell it. When her father died, she found herself helping support a number of family members, meaning she had to produce, and produce regularly at that. She tried her hand at literary fiction and did detective novels as well, ultimately writing more than fifty books total, but it’s the historical fiction set in the Georgian and specifically the Regency periods that really made her name.
These novels are very, very funny. She kept writing until her death in 1974, but her style would always retain that late 1920s, early 1930s vibe, like movies made before World War II. Farcical misunderstandings abound. Girls disguise themselves as boys. People slam into rooms and slam back out of rooms. There’s no sex, but certain couples—Charles and Sophy of The Grand Sophy, Deborah and Max of Faro’s Daughter—certainly give the sense they’d like to tear each other’s clothes off. People have names like “Ferdy Fakenham” and “Frederica Merriville.” She takes the thread of “can you believe these people” running through Austen and builds it into “my God, we, the hero and heroine, are surrounded by nincompoops and morons.” The plots generally culminate in absolutely absurd and hysterical set pieces. (One such scene involves a basket of ducklings.) She described her style as “a mixture of Johnson and Austen—what I rely on is a certain gift for the farcical.”
They read like larks, but these books incorporated a tremendous amount of research. Heyer built up a substantial reference library; Jane Aiken Hodge’s biography, The Private World of Georgette Heyer, contains pictures of her notebook, which was filled with detailed sketches of various styles of bonnets, dresses, cravats, military uniforms. Her rendering of Waterloo in An Infamous Army is famously meticulous. She plumbed books like Pierce Egan’s Life in London, with its vivid (and wacky) illustrations by Cruikshank. She had a enormous vocabulary book filled with Regency terms and phrases she’d collected, hence she’s also able to play with the slang of the period, which is perhaps the most entertaining element of her books. This is particularly on display in Friday’s Child, where characters spout ramblings like: “You can’t call me out in my own house. Devilish bad ton! Besides, of course the Incomparable is a flirt! Nothing in that! I’d lay a monkey she did it to make Severn jealous. Don’t tell me he wasn’t there! You can’t humbug me, my boy!”
But even though it’s built with a deep understanding of the period, Heyer’s is still a highly artificial clockwork world, like some eighteenth-century mechanical cabinet curiosity. And she isn’t evoking the Regency purely for the sake of evoking the Regency. Rather, she’s created a highly fanciful backdrop that shows off her characters to maximum advantage. For instance, Sir Richard, hero of The Corinthian, is a perfectly turned-out flower of fashion, typical of his time, who carries a quizzing glass and cares immensely for his cravats. But Heyer is careful to note that, “no tailoring, no amount of studied nonchalance, could conceal the muscle in his thighs, or the strength of his shoulders,” and “Above the starched points of his shirt-collar, a weary, handsome face showed its owner’s disillusionment.” And that’s just one of her heroes.
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