When only a Georgette Heyer will do

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Barbara Cartland, comedy, Georgette Heyer, heroes, heroines, Jane Austen, Of Human Telling, regency romances

‘I ought to be shot for writing such nonsense’ wrote Georgette Heyer, ‘but I think I should rather like it if I were sitting in an air-raid shelter or recovering from the flu.’

Nonsense Georgette Heyer’s regency romances may be, but there are times when they are just what the doctor ordered. From the first page we are taken into another world, knowing we are on safe ground where love and happiness will win through, in much the same way as Golden Age or cosy crime fiction leaves us with the reassurance that the baddies will get their come-uppance, good will triumph and order will be restored. Confidence and happiness is catching. Escapist literature gives us more than just a respite from our increasingly unpredictable and confusing world. It makes us feel better.

But why am I sounding so defensive? Perhaps because Georgette Heyer is sometimes viewed with disdainful superiority as being a literary stablemate of Barbara Cartland. Which is a mistake. This is not to criticise Barbara Cartland; I read one of her books when I was young and rather enjoyed it. If others had come my way, I’d probably have enjoyed those too. But anyone who has read more than a page of the regency novels of these two authors knows how entirely different they are.

It’s not surprising that Jane Austen devotees are often voracious readers of Georgette Heyer; it’s not only the regency setting and happy endings the novels have in common but the perfect grasp of comedy. We never tire of the humorous aspects of Mr Bennet, Mrs Elton and Mr Collins and so it is with the unforgettable comic characters who pepper Georgette Heyer’s books. Ask Georgette Heyer fans about which secondary character is the funniest and a clamour of opinions starts up, with Ferdy Fakenham in Friday’s Child a hot favourite.

Nor is it surprising that feminists often approve of Georgette Heyer because rather than creating soppy, milky heroines subservient to men, she shows us strong-minded, spirited young women who think and act for themselves: capable and feisty like Deborah in Faro’s Daughter and Sophy in The Grand Sophy who give as good as they get to any man who tries to rule them, intelligent and sensible like Drusilla in The Quiet Gentleman and Elinor in The Reluctant Widow.

Love doesn’t come one-size-fits-all either. We are shown mature love developing out of friendship in Sprig Muslin, the growth of self-knowledge and confidence in The Foundling, and a perceptive examination of the difference between infatuation and commitment in A Civil Contract.

‘A crash course in romantic novels – Georgette Heyer say – and men might learn what’s expected of them’ I made a disappointed character say with joking irony in my novel Of Human Telling. For Georgette Heyer offers us heroes to meet every changing taste as we grow older: boyishly charming Lord Sheringham in Friday’s Child, autocratic Lord Worth in Regency Buck, reformed rake Damerel in Venetia, philanthropic Waldo Hawkridge in The Nonesuch, wild Lord Vidal in Devil’s Cub, unassuming, kind-hearted Freddy in Cotillion. They may be very different but they have one thing in common: we can feel quite certain that they will always be faithful to the women they come to love and marry.

Georgette Heyer fans endlessly re-read her novels, catch themselves using the regency slang used by her characters, and hoard their tattered paperbacks so that unlike popular thrillers or issue novels you rarely find secondhand copies in charity shops. As the entirely wonderful Freddy Standen in Cotillion would say, stands to reason!

A woman ‘must improve her mind by extensive reading’ pronounces Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, and nobody can argue with the principle in spite of the haughty manner in which it is delivered here. But most of us need a varied diet – light-hearted, sun-filled novels as well as more serious, thought-provoking, questioning ones.

There are many other delightful authors whom we may turn to for sheer undemanding enjoyment or when we are feeling ill or in need of comfort. I only know that Georgette Heyer will always, like Sir Tristram Shield in The Talisman Ring, ride ventre à terre to my side.

Her publishers refused to pulp it

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heroes, heroines, Hodder & Stoughton, Madam Will You Talk, Mary Stewart, Nine Coaches Waiting, publicity, Rachel Hore

Mary Stewart, that wonderful author of romantic suspense novels with exotic settings and a literary flavour,  would have been a hundred years old on 17th September.

Media coverage when she died on 9th May 2014, aged 97, offered a fascinating picture of a woman whose chart-topping novels gave us a new kind of heroine: a so-called ordinary girl suddenly thrown into a dangerous situation and who finds the courage and intelligence to deal with it. As Rachel Hore wrote in The Guardian, ‘Stewart’s stories were narrated by poised, smart, highly-educated young women who drove fast cars and knew how to fight their corner …. tender-hearted and with a strong moral sense.’

But at a time when authors apparently have to be super-confident and go about endlessly promoting their work, it’s especially endearing to read that when she saw her first novel Madam, Will You Talk? in proof form in 1954 she asked her publishers not to go ahead. ‘It felt like walking naked down the street,’ she said. Thankfully her publishers refused to pulp it. She never had an agent – her first novel was a direct submission – and she stayed with Hodder & Stoughton all her life.

It’s more than 40 years since Nine Coaches Waiting, the story of a girl hired to be governess to a small boy heir to a chateau in France for sinister reasons,  was read aloud to me at boarding school. It might have been chosen because of the educational value of the quotes from poets and playwrights adorning the start of each chapter, but we were all enthralled by the enigmatic hero Raoul. For Mary Stewart didn’t just give us heroines we long to be like; she gave us heroes with whom we will always remain in love.

Dorothy Whipple -a perfect storyteller, not a pudding

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Dorothy Whipple, heroines, Jane Austen, Nicola Beauman, opening sentences, Persephone Books, Someone at a Distance, Virago

Widowed, in the house her husband had built with day and night nurseries and a music-room, as if the children would stay there for ever, instead of marrying and going off at the earliest possible moment, old Mrs North yielded one day to a long-felt desire to provide herself with company. She answered an advertisement in the personal column of The Times.

Old Mrs North’s husband had spoilt her, but now that he was dead and her three children married, no one spoilt her any more. She didn’t come first with anybody and she didn’t like that.

This is the opening of Dorothy Whipple’s last novel Someone at a Distance. Is it the kind of opening that would make agents jump up and down with excitement if they came across it in a submission today? Probably not, which is sad for those of us who love this kind of straightforward honest prose and storytelling.

Dorothy Whipple herself described it as ‘a fairly ordinary tale about the destruction of a happy marriage.’ There is the deceived wife, the foolishly weak husband, the envious, greedy French girl who sets out to seduce him to console herself, the traumatised teenaged children. But the way it all happens makes the novel a page turner.

This is not a plot-driven novel; what interested Dorothy Whipple was character, and she writes about people with acute psychological insight, subtly through telling little details and in simple everyday scenes.

The tragedy to come is foreshadowed when Louise, coming as companion to old Mrs North, reads aloud to her from Emma Bovary. She is escaping the humiliation of being rejected by a man above her in the social hierarchy of the French provincial town where her parents tiptoe around her afraid of what they have hatched. To take Avery away from Ellen will give Louise power again and restore her self-confidence. Ellen ‘didn’t deserve what she had if she couldn’t keep it’.

Ellen is what may annoy some modern readers; she is a happy housewife, unselfish and naive by the standards of today. Goodness in heroines is out of fashion in fiction. But she is thoroughly human: “All those books, all those prayers and she had got nothing from them. When everything went well for her she had been able to pray, she couldn’t now. There was such urgency in her present situation that until the pressure was removed she couldn’t think about God. She hadn’t the patience to pray. It was a shock to her. Surely God was for these times?”

The way Ellen deals with what happens to her and makes a new life for herself and her children gives the novel its redemptive drive. There is a sense of people coming together, crossing social barriers, in a common humanity. Among them is an old lady in the retirement hotel where Ellen takes a job: “But Mrs. Brockington, old, alone, almost crippled by rheumatism, had faith and courage. She had more. She had a warm serenity, and when Ellen was with her, she almost had it too. For goodness is catching. Mrs. Brockington was further on the road Ellen wanted to travel, and because Mrs. Brockington had got there, Ellen felt she might get there too.”

It’s fifty years this month since Dorothy Whipple died. Her novels were hugely popular in the 30s and 40s; J. B. Priestley described her as a worthy successor to Jane Austen. But when Someone at a Distance was published in 1953 it attracted no major reviews. She wrote no more novels and died in 1966 believing that her work would be forgotten.

It will always be a mystery (because Virago has rescued so many marvellous forgotten authors) that when Carmen Callil and her colleagues at Virago in the seventies were deciding which books to republish, they claimed that Dorothy Whipples’s ‘prose and content absolutely defeated us’. They invented something which they called the Dorothy Whipple line, below which they would not go – meaning that they considered her too lowbrow. Jane Austen – as usual – hit the nail on the head when she wrote that one half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.

Thankfully Nicola Beauman founder of Persephone Books didn’t feel the same way and has been vindicated in her championship. She published Someone at a Distance in 1999, the third in Persephone’s list, and subsequently many more of Dorothy Whipple’s novels: They Knew Mr Knight, The Priory, They Were Sisters, Greenbanks, High Wages, Because of the Lockwoods and The Closed Door and Other Stories. Dorothy Whipple is now Persephone’s best-selling author – and all this in spite of her surname which it must be admitted does make one think of a fancy pudding …

Wit, moral seriousness and a seeing eye. There are not many authors whom one can read over and over again with continuing pleasure and gratitude, but Dorothy Whipple is one of them.

 

 

‘Horribly good’ heroines?

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Agents, Elizabeth Bennet, Fanny Price, goodness, heroines, Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, Mary Crawford, moral fiction, Saki, The Story-Teller

A man in a railway carriage, driven to desperation by noisy small children around him being unsuccessfully entertained by their unimaginative and strait-laced aunt, shuts them up  with a story about a little girl called Bertha.

‘Was she pretty?’ asked the bigger of the small girls.

‘Not as pretty as any of you,’ said the bachelor, ‘but she was horribly good.’

There was a wave of reaction in favour of the story; the word horrible in connection with goodness was a novelty that commended itself. It seemed to introduce a ring of truth that was absent from the aunt’s tales of infant life. (from Saki’s The Story-Teller)

It looks as if adults don’t like heroines who are ‘good’ any more than children do. In modern fiction it’s difficult to think of more than a handful of heroines we might describe using the word. Is this because we no longer look to fiction for moral guidance or inspiration in the way that people once did?

This might help explain why Fanny Price is Jane Austen’s least popular heroine; she hasn’t aged well. Patience and gentleness and a faithful loving heart combined with strong principles were enough in a heroine at the time Jane Austen was writing Mansfield Park, but modern readers often find Fanny’s passivity spineless and her virtue irritating. They prefer the amusing and witty Mary Crawford, who takes active steps to get what she wants.

It may be that readers often dislike Fanny because she comes across as naturally good – and therefore difficult to identify with. There might even be a sense in which she shows us up, and we don’t like that either. She doesn’t make mistakes about people or find herself initially attracted to a dodgy man, like Elizabeth Bennet does. Elizabeth is morally upright, but she combines virtue with a sense of fun, dawning self-knowledge and awareness of her own errors of judgment; it’s not surprising that many people say she’s their favourite Jane Austen heroine.

I can’t think of a Fanny type heroine in modern fiction – and if a new author tried having one in a novel, agents would probably advise making them less wet. So is it that we don’t want heroines to be any more ‘good’ than we know ourselves to be?

Or can modern writers get away with a ‘good’ heroine if enough of their moral vacillation is shown? Maybe this is the problem with Fanny. Secret suffering and standing up for principles in silence: what’s the interest in that? But if a heroine is seen to struggle with moral choices, between right and wrong and the muddle between them, and then act on her decisions, her goodness is not the passive quality that we are warned to avoid when writing a novel.

 

 

 

 

Find me a hero worthy of the name

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Charlotte Bronte, Fifty Shades of Grey, heroines, modern heroes, Mr Rochester

‘Reader, I married him’ – such a splendid and triumphant remark from Jane Eyre.

She was marrying a creep of course, but that is by modern standards. In Charlotte Bronte the heroes are generally bossy, arrogant, and sadistic if not actually wicked. Women had such a hard time of it then, it’s hardly surprising they turned a blind eye to men’s defects – or actually found them sensually attractive.

A letter written by Charlotte Bronte to a friend sheds some light on how women probably coped: ‘Man is indeed an amazing piece of mechanism when you see, so to speak, the full weakness of what he calls his strength. There is not a female child above the age of eight but might rebuke him for spoilt petulance of his wilful nonsense’.

But Charlotte Bronte’s heroes are at least memorable, both in themselves and the passionate love they inspire in the women who fall for them. Think of Lucy Snowe’s feelings for Paul Emmanuel in Villette: ‘Once – unknown and unloved, I held him harsh and strange; the low stature, the wiry make, the angles, the darkness, the manner displeased me. Now, penetrated with his influence, and living by his affection, having his worth by intellect, and his goodness by heart – I preferred him before all humanity.’

Paul Emmanuel is very far from perfect, and certainly not handsome, but he is a substantial three-dimensional character who dominates the novel. Where are the comparable heroes in modern fiction?

Our celebrated tradition of complex and magnetic heroines who forever linger in the mind continues, but I can’t immediately think of any particularly admirable men in novels published recently. Are we, in an age of equality, really happy to be reduced to the likes of ridiculous Christian Grey who might be said to follow in a direct line from Mr Rochester, that would-be bigamous seducer with a habit of buying women?

spinsters of the splendid kind

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Barbara Pym, heroines, India Knight, spinsters

Was the great tradition in fiction of Splendid Spinsters pushed into obscurity by the arrival of Bridget Jones?

This is India Knight’s opening premise in her enjoyable piece in the Guardian Saturday 25 October  It’s the fear, she says, actually the all-out terror, of spinsterhood that drives the chick lit fiction ushered in by Bridget Jones. Our troubles as women can only be assuaged and our lives fulfilled if we find ourselves a man.

It doesn’t stop there. Even when a partner is acquired, before long there’s the relentless work of holding onto him, and so this is the stuff of the sequels. Because, as India Knight puts it, the still single women are busy scanning rooms, wondering whose husband to nick. She calls it a woeful scenario and a depressing way of looking at love.

It’s at this point that India Knight admits that her first proper literary crushes were on Barbara Pym heroines, those excellent women who don’t moan about their lot but live fully with all the pleasures and disappointments, big and small, that come their way.

Our appetite for the arrested development of chick lit has apparently faded. Now writers are serving up complex and steely heroines, sometimes dipped into dark and violent ink. The strong spinster in all but name is back and most readers can’t get enough of her. But India Knight confesses that she still likes the quiet old-fashioned type of spinster too, and hurtles back at intervals during the year to soak up the richness of Pym’s creations.