Georgette Heyer or Why I Go Straight to the Dessert

"But that Cousin Joseph, ignoring the claims of George, and Laurence, and her beloved Julian, should have named Waldo Hawkridge as his heir was so intolerable that had she been of a nervous disposition she must have succumbed to Spasms when she had first heard the incredible news."

-The Nonesuch, Georgette Heyer

It's really very difficult to think of a reason for the pleasant, anticipatory flutterings I feel when I first embark on a Heyer. Heyer is many things, warm, funny, romantic, witty, tolerant, sophisticated, but none of these qualities has ever blinded me to the fact that her books are like dessert. Sweet, desirable, sinful, tempting and addictive. Too much of them is not wholesome, they cannot substitute for an actual meal, and they definitely do not have the moral stature that is attributed so often to, say, Cabbage.

However, cabbages are cabbages, and we are not here to speak of cabbages, worthy though they might be. We are here to speak of Ms. Heyer, to whose faults, as we have already established, I am not blind. Yet I cannot stop myself from reading her books. I am drawn to her books, pulled into them, and when they are over, I feel a sad sense of loss, as though I have lost something incredibly dear, an age, or an era, or an atmosphere, if you like, that was not simple or good, no, not at all, but glamorous and amorous and bare bosomed and wigged and booted and heeled and clocked and fobbed and patched and gowned and breeched.

Then maybe it's just a language thing, you say. The obsession of reading about such curious things as quizzing glasses and duels and mantuas and bonnets and spangled gowns and yellow pantaloons. Maybe I am simply grateful to her for teaching me the difference between a trot, a canter and a gallop; between a quadrille, a country dance and a waltz; between flippant, frivolous and frippery. I could go on and on, but it is not that only.

It is more than just a fancy I have taken to the Fancy. It is the freedom of the Duke who escapes his relations, and the revenge of the Duke who is reformed by his page, and the redemption of the selfish Marquis who discovered relatives he never knew he had, and the fun-loving young Viscount who finds love in his unsophisticated wife, long, long after he marries her. And the heroines! Best of all are the women, young,old, reserved, saucy, dignified, tomboys, whatever they might be, they're always funny, and always, in their inimitable Heyer ways, they are women- shrewish or maternal, innocent or worldly wise. And in all this are the strains of a warm, warm love, like an inviting fireplace or a perfect joke or all things light and sweet and lovely. Like mousse and souffle and cheesecake and icecream.

Or just a piece of fruitcake, warm from the oven.