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Justification of guilty pleasures
Jan. 25th, 2006 11:03 amI have a habit of reading certain comfort books in the depths of winter. Some of them are perfectly respectable because of their age or established literary reputations, while others require a certain amount of defensiveness for a literary snob to read without embarrassment (the question of literary snobbery can be reserved for another day). I was pleased some years back to read A. S. Byatt's essay on Georgette Heyer, but I've remained defensive about reading Heyer myself, because one cannot carry around the essay on the off-chance that one would want to use it as a counter-argument at some point.
Heyer wrote quite a lot of bad fiction, and the worst that she wrote, her appalling political-historical fiction, was the stuff that made her proudest, while according to her widower, she hated writing the frivolous romance novels that supported her, made her reputation, and make her worth reading.
Much of the time, when I defend Heyer's writing, I talk about her prodigious research of every detail of the Regency period. She knew what was fashionable, and in which year. She was more interested in what happened politically, but she rarely brought her political knowledge to bear in her romance novels. Politics would not interest her readers. When it does show up, it shows up around the edges, much like the details of sarsenet and muslin, giving the stories that stamp of authenticity.
When I say that's what makes her worthwhile, I am utterly in the wrong. There are plenty of writers with voluminous research, and many of them are not at all shy about displaying those volumes. I have in my basement a complete set of the novels of Louisa Muhlbach, purchased by some Schaefer in search of respectable leather-bound books to decorate a wall more than a hundred years ago, and read by no one until I cut their pages in the 1960s, when I would read anything. Muhlbach could tell you all about the clothes and the poetry of Henry VIII or Napoleon (of any number), but her books deserve the wall decoration fate. She never wrote a sentence that anyone could remember by the next paragraph.
What makes Heyer worth reading is this: "Lady Theresa prophesied disaster for all concerned, and hoped that when Serena was dying an old maid she would remember these words, and be sorry. Meanwhile she remained her affectionate aunt." (Bath Tangle, 1955)
Heyer wrote quite a lot of bad fiction, and the worst that she wrote, her appalling political-historical fiction, was the stuff that made her proudest, while according to her widower, she hated writing the frivolous romance novels that supported her, made her reputation, and make her worth reading.
Much of the time, when I defend Heyer's writing, I talk about her prodigious research of every detail of the Regency period. She knew what was fashionable, and in which year. She was more interested in what happened politically, but she rarely brought her political knowledge to bear in her romance novels. Politics would not interest her readers. When it does show up, it shows up around the edges, much like the details of sarsenet and muslin, giving the stories that stamp of authenticity.
When I say that's what makes her worthwhile, I am utterly in the wrong. There are plenty of writers with voluminous research, and many of them are not at all shy about displaying those volumes. I have in my basement a complete set of the novels of Louisa Muhlbach, purchased by some Schaefer in search of respectable leather-bound books to decorate a wall more than a hundred years ago, and read by no one until I cut their pages in the 1960s, when I would read anything. Muhlbach could tell you all about the clothes and the poetry of Henry VIII or Napoleon (of any number), but her books deserve the wall decoration fate. She never wrote a sentence that anyone could remember by the next paragraph.
What makes Heyer worth reading is this: "Lady Theresa prophesied disaster for all concerned, and hoped that when Serena was dying an old maid she would remember these words, and be sorry. Meanwhile she remained her affectionate aunt." (Bath Tangle, 1955)
