First of all, I don’t care a groat for the idiots claiming that because they can’t track down the sources she was using, she was some kind of liar or fabulist. Her biographers state that she relied heavily on memoirs and collected letters which she found in private libraries that could well have been dispersed to the four winds in the fifty to eighty years since Heyer did her homework. Her research files seem to have been destroyed or dispersed after her own death and the suicide of her husband, which doesn’t help matters either. Both the biographers and the detractors seem to be ignorant of the actual fiction writers of the period, beyond Jane Austen. Heyer, on the other hand, shows signs of knowing them well. Lona Manning’s extensive reading in the period has brought to light a couple of writers whose tropes might have influenced Heyer, and at least a couple more who were not much as story-tellers but offered a wealth of detail about the culture of their time.  

It is however reasonable to say that Heyer, like her successors, filtered what she learned about the Georgian and Regency eras through her own culture and beliefs. In that sense, she is about as much of a fabulist as her modern detractors are, because (at least in her more escapist books) she is not much interested in history as history, only as a platform for what interests her, which is also how her detractors approach the period. Her comedic banter uses Regency cant mixed with a style and cadence similar to the more flippant moments of Dorothy Sayers and Margery Allingham, and whether you like the style of characterization used by those two mystery authors is probably a better indicator of whether you will like Heyer than whether you like, say, Julia Quinn.

Over the next few posts, I will be ranking the Heyer Historicals as “low-rotation,” “medium-rotation,” and “high-rotation,” based on how often I get the urge to read them. If it’s not mentioned, either assume I haven’t read it at all (The Great Roxhythe, The Spanish Bride, An Infamous Army) or haven’t read it recently enough to have an opinion (her medieval novels, The Black Moth, The Convenient Marriage, The Devil’s Cub, Powder and Patch). I had a publication list in front of me when I wrote these posts originally, so you may see a vague tendency towards chronological order of release for the individual entries, especially in the “low rotation” entries. Listing order within a post is otherwise random, and does not reflect anything about the relative merits of any given pair of novels mentioned in the same post.