Jo Walton ([info]papersky) wrote,
@ 2003-01-24 18:23:00
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My ranking of Heyer
[info]diony was asking about which Heyer were good ones to try. I think this depends a lot on who you ask and what you like. When I was asking about this I found that ones some people loved were ones others especially hated.



Now, I do not read romances generally, I despise Barbara Cartland, I yawn at Madeleine Brent and anything with a cover showing a heroine swooning makes me look for something with an exploding spaceship. I have however read a number of romance novels when I was too young to know better, and since that I have read some by people who have written other things too, mostly Joan Aiken, I've read almost all of Aiken. Aiken's Regencies are, well, different, and I can't believe they let her get away with the end of An Embroidered Sunset. She's just in her own class.

I started reading Heyer because of conversations like this on rasfw:

Someone: "Shards of Honor is just like a romance novel!"

Me: "Where are the romance novels that are like Shards of Honor?"

Lis Carey or some other rational person: "Georgette Heyer."

After sufficient repetition, I kept on not reading any. I finally picked up some Heyer when someone told me Heyer was trying to write more Jane Austen novels. I don't know what made them think that, but anyway, the imagined combination of more Jane Austen and Shards of Honor was enough to make me get one out of the library and I'm glad I did. They rapidly became comfort reads.

However, while Heyer writes wonderful repartee, I think she is at her best with a plot in which nothing much happens, she wasn't good with drama. A dog loose in a park, yes, but not a battle or exciting adventures. She was terrible with villains, but good with awful aunts. My favourites of her novels tend to be the less eventful.

My ranking of Heyer would go like this:

A Civil Contract
About a million miles ahead of all the others. This is a book with no romance, indeed, in which the dopey romance would have been a terrible idea. There's a lot of love in it, though. It's the "It doesn't change a thing, but even so, after twenty-five years, it's nice to know" kind of love, rather than the whirlwind kind. It also has nicely measured plot, exquisite sensibility, and macaroons. It has all Heyer's types, and does lovely things with them.

Excellent
The Grand Sophy
Wonderful repartee, a plot in which very little happens but all of it on oiled wheels, matchmaking, and a monkey.
The Unknown Ajax
"He had imperceptibly become indispensible to her comfort."
Cotillion
In which she managed to surprise me with the resolution. And the hero is just lovely. This is another one like tGS in which the heroine matchmakes.
Venetia
The only "damsel marries rake" novel I've ever read in which I can believe in the happiness of their subsequent marriage.
Frederica
Beautiful repartee, a balloon ride and a Baluchistan hound.
The Corinthian
If the world needed one novel about a heroine running away disguised as a boy and travelling with the hero without realising she'd fallen in love with him, this would be it.
Sprig Muslin
And if the world needed one novel about a hero beset with a would-be heroine while loving the sensible woman he was supposed to marry, this would be that one.
Sylvester
I cannot believe the protagonists will ever do anything but bicker, but nevertheless the style with which they bicker makes up for a great deal. Also, virtually the only Heyer heroine with even a pretence at being capable of making her own living.
The Foundling
This is different from most of Heyer's novels, even those it closely resembles, by being a coming of age novel.

Good
Arabella
A little too saccharine, but still amusing.
Black Sheep
An older heroine and a reformed rake.
The Nonesuch
Memorable for having a heroine who is a governess.
Devil's Cub
Sequel to These Old Shades but it would be better if it weren't.
Regency Buck
Again, a bit saccharine and it's all so predictable, but still worth reading.
False Colours
Has the best awful old woman in all of Heyer, and Heyer was terrific at awful old women. This is the one the sig I had for a long time on alt.poly came from.
Charity Girl
Same plot as Sprig Muslin and The Foundling, but feels more like it's just going through the motions.
April Lady
I wish the heroine wasn't such a wimp.
Bath Tangle
The heroine is deeply unlikable, but I did like the tangle and the resolution of it.
Friday's Child
I would like this book a lot if I could believe in the marriage as a marriage. I find it very hard to suspend my disbelief where there are people who are married for quite a while, and sleeping together, but who are moved to orgasm by a kiss with feeling. I was going along fine with this book until the morning after the wedding where nothing whatsoever has changed between them. This is also a problem with April Lady. I know Heyer didn't want to write about sex -- she could, she kept writing into the sixties, but she didn't want to, and that's OK, but other people before her time wrote books in which sex existed and had effects even if it wasn't described as a graphic act. (Rebecca, 1938, Purposed of Love, 1938) A Civil Contract has offstage but plausible sex for that matter.

Poor
The Masqueraders
Too much plot and all totally implausible.
Powder and Patch
I didn't believe it. Dull.
These Old Shades
Tortured plot.
The Reluctant Widow
Gothic implausible plot.
Faro's Daughter
Dull. Heroine does have a profession, though.
The Toll Gate
Idiotic smuggling plot, barely visible romance.
Cousin Kate
Gothic and over the top.
The Convenient Marriage
Silly. But some brilliant dialogue in the first chapter.
The Quiet Gentleman
Gothic and implausible.
Lady of Quality
Dull.

Awful
An Infamous Army
Out of her depth. A sort of sequel to Devil's Cub and Regency Buck, and at its best when it is being. The version of the battle of Waterloo is painful -- I don't doubt it's accurate, but goodness me what a way to try to write it! I wonder why she didn't write more sequels, or at least roman a fleuve, give people bit parts in other novels? Oh well.
Simon the Coldheart
Historical. Ghastly.
The Conqueror
I couldn't finish this one.
My Lord John
I couldn't finish this one either. Medieval in all senses. Forsoothly.
Royal Escape
Also painfully forsoothly.


Even so, I've read all of them at least twice but the Awful section and Powder and Patch, which I left in a cottage in Scotland to add to the bookshelf of books people had left.

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[info]pelianth
2003-01-24 04:47 pm UTC (link)
Oooh. Georgette Heyer. The only romance novels I'll read. (Well okay I've got some of Anne McCaffrey ones and then there's all the shojo manga, but I don't count those...)

They are very good comfort novels though. Perfect when what you really need is a cup of hot chocolate/tea/boyc and something nice and fluffy to read. You seem to have managed to find a few that I can't though.

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[info]redbird
2003-01-24 04:51 pm UTC (link)
By the way, you posted this twice.

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[info]papersky
2003-01-24 05:21 pm UTC (link)
Well it's better than what the server told me, which was that it hadn't posted at all, which after all that listing of titles seemed rather disheartening.

Now with added cut-tags!

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[info]cliosfolly
2003-01-24 06:42 pm UTC (link)
This reminds me that I started reading a Bulwer-Lytton novel this week, The Last Days of Pompeii, which I'm laughing my way through because it's so delightfully bad. When I started reading it, it reminded me a bit of Heyer, on a very off day and afflicted with a desire to write about classical Roman times--a comparison which strikes me mostly because of the use of 19th century slang transposed into Latin ("Per Jove!" being my favorite example so far).

A Civil Contract is one of my favorites, too, because it involves what-happens-after-marriage for the main characters, and makes that central to the story; and because it's also about reconceiving one's dreams (although rather tangentially), which doesn't seem to be a topic many other stories touch upon. Some coming of age stories do it (I Capture the Castle is one example that comes to mind), but in some ways it seems enough an aspect of the coming of age story that I'm not sure it should count.

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[info]papersky
2003-01-25 08:48 am UTC (link)
It's such a non-theme that the only things I can think of are Memory and China Mountain Zhang, and for some reason Westley saying "If only we had a wheelbarrow!"

Oh I want to write a novel about someone reconceiving their dreams and nothing much happening in a really weird fantasy world, but instead I have to write an Irish tragedy. I can't even make it a book about that because I've written too much about them later. I know where they are at the end. Talk about painting yourself into a corner. Or, um, I suppose it would be very peculiar to write about marriage and reconceiving dreams from Atha's POV. Hmm. Thurrig too. Hrm. Hoom, hom, better let that thought vegetate for a little while.

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[info]cliosfolly
2003-01-25 10:18 am UTC (link)
I don't know why Memory didn't leap to mind immediately, particularly as it's a favorite of mine.

I'm not sure why it isn't treated more often; so many stories start out with folks finding a path on which to build their dreams that it seems like it shouldn't be that uncommon that the path gets washed out by a stream and the character has to pace the river a bit before finding a new route on which to cross or a bridge that needs building, or the path disappears entirely and by the time the character's found a new one, it's headed in a different direction. But instead, the farthest stories seem to go is finding that the path gets jerked sideways a bit, or has rockslides obscuring it that need to be cleared first.

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[info]papersky
2003-01-25 11:03 am UTC (link)
That's such a good way of putting it.

OK. Leaving aside coming-of-age novels.
How about Joan Aiken's Foul Matter?
Atwood's Lady Oracle?
John Barnes A Million Open Doors and Earth Made of Glass?
Octavia Butler Xenogenesis?
A.S. Byatt Possession -- thinking about Roland. One way of reading it is Roland's journey from reading Ash on writing to writing himself, from the research on the background reading Ash did in Vico for "The Garden of Proserpina" to reading it himself and going on from there into wanting different things.
Cherryh Rimrunners though thinking about that from that angle makes me wonder what the distinction between that and selling out is -- POV, essentially. I expect Elli thought Miles sold out.
A lot of Sumner Locke Elliott is about this, but again not in a very positive way. (I have a spare copy of Edens Lost if anyone needs it.)
The Bone People Keri Hulme. That's a definite.

What an odd collection of books, especially to put with Memory and A Civil Contract!

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[info]cliosfolly
2003-01-30 07:09 pm UTC (link)
Hmm. Here are a couple of others to add in:

Mary Doria Russel's The Sparrow, and its sequel Children of God
Cherryh's Finity's End
Guy Gavriel Kay's Sailing to Sarantium, which is interesting because it portrays Crispin after his original dreams and hopes were dashed, and then shows them wrecked once again, and what happens after is the subject of the first volume and the conclusion of the second, I think.
McKinley's The Herow and the Crown, perhaps, although it's also about the consequences of obtaining one's dreams, too.
Maybe Brust's Teckla onwards (if I'm remembering correctly and Teckla is where things start to go decidedly askew between Vlad and Cawti). It seems to me that there's a step of re-evaluation and reconsideration between the loss of an original dream and the development of a new one(s), and this is where Vlad has been since he left Adrilankha. Though this one could also be a POV issue of selling out, but I'm not sure who's POV. It strikes me that it's how Vlad might view the situation, to some degree--I should re-read the books to better evaluate this, though.

Well, POV. I think Miles, and his parents, would see the consequences of his actions at the beginning of Memory as breaking his dreams; I agree that Elli might see it as selling out. Hmm. I haven't entirely thought this through, so I'm not sure if I'll end by agreeing with myself, but it seems to me that there's an emotional component--of sympathy or empathy, whichever--in recognizing another's dreams, because dreams themselves (while they might consist of practical goals) are colored by emotions: hopes, fears, desires, and so forth. If one can't recognize or empathize with those emotions, or the possibility of one's emotions being focused on a goal, then the dream is stripped down to the practical nature of its goal. And if the goal isn't something one values, it might be difficult to see how another might value it. This might be part of what's underlying Elli's reaction; she can't empathize with Miles' connection to Barrayar, and so, while she can intellectually recognize that he's choosing a new goal, she can't see that he's created a new dream; it looks to her that he's substituted a goal for a dream, and sees it as an inferior choice that he's making based on a misbegotten sense of obligation to dirtsiders who refused to recognize that he'd had this other great dream in the first place, and was doing well with it as Admiral of the Dendarii. So POV would make a distinction between new dreams and old dreams depending on where the POV's sympathy with the focus of the emotions underlying new goals lay.

Possession, which I haven't read in the past several years, left me depressed every time I read it as I recall, specifically because of the circumstances you cite above, I think; I empathized so much with Roland's original goals that I wasn't willing to accept the changing of his desires.

I haven't read anything by Sumner Locke Elliot--is there a particularly good title with which to start?

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[info]kate_nepveu
2003-01-25 07:48 pm UTC (link)
"Or, um, I suppose it would be very peculiar to write about marriage and reconceiving dreams from Atha's POV. Hmm. Thurrig too."

I think I might find both Atha & Darag POVs interesting, as well as Thurrig.

Also, I usually think of The Unknown Ajax as having a fair amount of plot, just with the last chapter or two.

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[info]papersky
2003-01-26 06:49 am UTC (link)
Darag's POV just isn't a possibility. There are a whole pile of reasons for this, but mostly I couldn't take being in his head for that long.

My central conception of Darag comes from Horslips's albun "The Tain", which makes Cuchulain understandable, rather than just superhuman and mad. I see him very much as andain, to use Guy Kay's word, and trying to be human.

"Everything I say" Cuchulain cried
"Is larger far than life itself."
"Every step I take," Cuchulain said,
"is measured out in centuries.
"Everything I do is ringed about with fantasy."

(From the song Gae Bolga.) No way can I write his POV in a sustained way.

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[info]cliosfolly
2003-01-30 07:25 pm UTC (link)
Hee! I just came across this tonight, in an article I was reading for a class; the article talks about how textual criticism can impact the work of literary critics (the author's opinion is that literary critics take the absoluteness of printed texts too much for granted and, in doing so, neglect the study of the transmission of texts which might demonstrate that their basis of critical study of a text is ill-founded).

As an example of what studying the history of a text can reveal, the author cites a poem of Yeats about Cuchulain, "Cuchulain's Fight with the Sea." In case you hadn't run into this, I thought it was interesting enough to pass along, partly for its touching upon Cuchulain, and partly because it's a neat example of the draft process a poem underwent. A final revision the poem underwent deleted several lines, edited some more, and changed the ending:

In three days' time, Cuchulain with a moan
Stood up, and came to the long sands alone:
For four days warred he with the bitter tide;
And the waves flowed above him, and he died.

to
[....] Cuchulain stirred,
Stared on the horses of the sea, and heard
The cars of battle and his own name cried;
And fought with the invulnerable tide.

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[info]rivka
2003-01-24 08:11 pm UTC (link)
I've only read two Heyer books, A Civil Contract and Charity Girl. They're hard to find, for some reason - never in used bookstores, and my library only has a few in large-print editions. People with good vision aren't supposed to read Heyer unless they've always read Heyer, I suppose.

I loved A Civil Contract. Charity Girl I thought had absolutely dreadful prose - far too heavily larded with period slang. I have no problem whatsoever with period slang, used judiciously, but Charity Girl had page after page of dialogue like "I am not a popinjay, sir, nor am I a lark-twiddler! Do you think me an antler-dresser? What spiffery! What a squizzle!"*

I just couldn't take it.



*Obviously, I'm making the actual terms up. I don't have a copy to hand.

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[info]lcohen
2003-01-24 08:47 pm UTC (link)
well your terms were close enough that you made me laugh quite a bit just now.

antler-dresser *giggle*

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write on, do!
[info]replyhazy
2003-01-25 05:36 pm UTC (link)
"What spiffery!" I'm lolling about in my chair laughing. Do write a little romance novel parody full of these made-up indignancies! Hilarious!

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[info]marykaykare
2003-01-24 10:08 pm UTC (link)
I don't think I've ever actually read any of Heyer's Regencies, though I keep meaning to. I did read one of her mysteries and tried to read a second. Don't Go There. Really bad.

I suspect the reason they're hard to find is that nobody ever gets rid of them, just read them until they fall apart.

MKK

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[info]papersky
2003-01-25 05:43 am UTC (link)
They might be hard to find in the US, but they're deeply easy to find in Swansea, Cambridge and Hay on Wye, which is where I acquired the collection cited above, over a period of about six months of normal second hand bookshop trawling.

I have a spare False Colours and a spare The Quiet Gentleman, neither in good condition, but perfectly readable and with all the words, if anyone wants them.

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(Anonymous)
2003-01-26 08:24 am UTC (link)
OK, you've convinced me to give Heyer a try. My neighborhood usedbook store didn't have any when I browsed it yesterday (they've just moved a block away and their stock is a little low, I'll keep trying) so I had a fine excuse this morning (as if I need one) to go to B&N, which gets my business on Sunday morning because it opens at 9am.

I found four Heyer titles in the romance section -- all published by Harlequin (oh, my). No A Civil Contract unfortunately but I got The Corinthian which is on your excellent list. (The other titles available there were The Nonesuch, Cousin Kate, and The Talisman Ring).

-- Janet

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[info]truepenny
2003-01-25 07:08 am UTC (link)
Interestingly, aside from the fact that I'll put up with any amount of Gothickness in a plot, your list looks remarkably like my list. I'll add that The Talisman Ring has my second favorite pair of older lovers (right after Sprig Muslin) and while the plot is quite Gothic, everyone in the book knows it's quite Gothic and the hero is actually excessively pained by the Gothickness in which he is forced to participate.

Mostly, I agree with [info]marykaykare, her mysteries are dreadful. But I quite like Envious Casca, which is slightly overwrought comedy of manners and relatively unburdened with plot.

And don't, whatever you do, read Penhallow. Ghastly beyond belief. She couldn't write serious novels. She just couldn't. And considering that if she hadn't tried, we might have gotten another Civil Contract out of the deal, I really wish she'd just left them alone.

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[info]papersky
2003-01-25 08:00 am UTC (link)
I'd put TR under "poor", I read it from the library. Oh, and The Black Moth, also read from the library, also poor.

I don't mind gothic if it's done well, but Heyer just creaks at it, you get the feeling she doesn't believe it herself and the poor book sags under the burden.

She was better at writing about nothing that anyone -- the absolute opposite of Le Guin, now I come to think of it. Heyer is marvellous about writing about a dinner party and the people you meet buying ribbons and the inconvenience of not being able to get a chair when it's raining. Give her a villain and she doesn't know what to do with him, he stands about awkwardly making the plot draughty. There's not much depth there, but the level she reaches she reaches really well.

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The Reluctant Widow
[info]gilraen2
2003-10-31 02:18 pm UTC (link)
I have to disagree about The Reluctant Widow. It may indeed have "a Gothic implausible plot", but the point of the book is the way the sane, sensible, commonplace people manage NOT to react to the "Gothic implausible plot". It's kind of an antithesis of Northanger Abbey.

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(Anonymous)
2006-05-25 03:14 pm UTC (link)
Friday's Child
I would like this book a lot if I could believe in the marriage as a marriage. I find it very hard to suspend my disbelief where there are people who are married for quite a while, and sleeping together, but who are moved to orgasm by a kiss with feeling. I was going along fine with this book until the morning after the wedding where nothing whatsoever has changed between them.


As someone who has read 'Friday's Child' many times, I think the point is that they haven't done anything. Nothing has changed. Hero and Sherry's relationship is exactly the same as before, except that they're married.

Still doesn't excuse April Lady though.

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[info]shewhohashope
2008-01-18 08:43 pm UTC (link)
I'm reading 'Shards of Honour' and 'Barrayar' right now, and I kept thinking Barrayar oddly reminded me of 'Friday's Child'. I think it's because the heroine (while not as unsophisticated as Hero) is so unfamiliar with Barrayaran high society and never quite does or says what she's expected to.

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[info]zalena
2009-04-01 06:15 pm UTC (link)
Here via [info]mrissa. I am also an enormous fan of Joan Aiken. My library was recently getting rid of a bunch of her books and I bought them all, not because I hadn't read them, but because I realized I could no longer depend on them to act as a repository for her work. It kills me that more people aren't familiar with her work, and that it's getting harder to find.

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