Heyer: The Black Moth/Black Sheep
May. 14th, 2009 10:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyThis post is as much a PSA as anything else: two publishers, Sourcebooks Casablanca and HQN (otherwise known as Harlequin), seem to be in competition to reprint Heyer's books. The funny thing is, it's very difficult to tell one from the other. Trade paperback, similar palettes, similar fonts (the fonts they use for GEORGETTE HEYER are almost indistinguishable), similar choices wrt cover art: oil paintings of Regency people. Sourcebooks is using better quality paper and has eschewed the dodge of "foreword by NYT bestselling author!"--and doesn't have ads for their other books in the back, either, which I confess counts as a win in my estimation. Sourcebooks is also making a serious effort to reprint Heyer's historical novels (i.e., all the ones that aren't category romances) and mysteries, which means that I finally, finally have a copy of The Unfinished Clue that isn't literally falling to pieces in my hands. So, yeah. PSA. If you're looking to complete your Heyer collection, or to replace books in bad condition, now is a really good time.
The Black Moth and Black Sheep are the two Heyer romances I have never previously been able to find. (You may imagine my glee in the dealers' room at Penguicon when I discovered them.) They make an interesting pair, and not only for the color motif in their titles.
The Black Moth is Heyer's first novel, famously written to entertain a convalescent brother when she was seventeen, and if the book as published is what she wrote as a seventeen-year-old, she was magnificently precocious and should possibly be canonized as St. Georgette, patron of teenage writers.
It is, quite obviously, her first novel. The plot depends heavily on coincidence--our hero, the Earl of Wyncham, wrongfully disgraced and now amusing himself by playing highwayman, waylays not one person he knows, not two, but three: his brother, his best friend, and his enemy, who is conveniently at that moment in the process of abducting the heroine. And Heyer doesn't quite have control of her material. The secondary couple (the earl's brother and his wife, who is the villain's sister) have far too much time center-stage (my opinion here quite possibly colored by my intense desire to drown them both in a bucket), and Heyer is clearly fascinated by her villain without quite knowing how to make him work.
That villain, Tracy Belmanoir, Duke of Andover, and his deeply dysfunctional family, is clearly a trial run for Justin Alastair, Duke of Avon, and his equally dysfunctional family, as we meet them in These Old Shades and Devil's Cub. I just reread the first chapter of TOS, and you can in fact match what Avon says about his backstory onto Andover's progress through TBM, point for point, except that she's changed all the names. Belmanoir becomes Alastair (with curious, heavy-lidded hazel eyes instead of curious, heavy-lidded green eyes); John Carstares (the Earl of Wyncham), who uses the alias Anthony Ferndale, becomes Anthony Merivale; Diana Beauleigh becomes Jennifer Beauchamp; Frank Fortescue (Belmanoir's BFF) becomes Hugh Davenant (and Tracy Belmanoir's first given name, which he apparently does not use, is Hugh); Tracy's sister Lavinia becomes Justin's sister Fanny; Tracy's brother Andrew becomes Justin's brother Rupert (and Tracy's brother Bob mercifully disappears, perhaps drowned in the bucket I brought for Lavinia and Richard?); and we can pick up and continue right along.
(I would love, btw, to know why she changed her cast from Belmanoirs to Alastairs. I can guess that one reason was the uncomfortable closeness produced by having the hero and villain of The Black Moth be brothers-in-law, especially when the villain's villainy consists in twice abducting the young lady who becomes the hero's wife, but that's only a guess.)
Tracy isn't entirely successful as a character; he's too obviously an artificial assemblage, without that deeper sense of interiority and self-judgment that makes Justin Alastair as compelling as he is. But oddly, he also has one moment of psychological depth and truth that is unlike anything else I've come across in Heyer:
Right there, just for a moment, there's a glimpse of something under all the Byronism of Andover and Avon and most especially Vidal (I love Vidal, but he is, of all Heyer's heroes, the one who is frankly a guilty pleasure, because I do know better*), the same Byronism she goes on to make fun of in Venetia and to deconstruct in Cousin Kate (really, psychopaths aren't as much fun as you think)--something shockingly real in the midst of the mannered artificiality of the book. And yet something also that isn't the point--Tracy barely thinks it's worth mentioning. I can't articulate why this affects me as strongly as it does, but it stands out very sharply for me.
The mannered artificiality, mind, is part of the fun. Despite Harlequin putting a Regency buck on the cover, this isn't a Regency; it's set in the 1740s, and not one man of the cast would dream of being seen in public with his hair cropped like that. Wigs and patches and fans, and she evokes brilliantly the deep and pervasive artificiality of England's upper crust. Tracy and his spoilt, tantrumy sister Lavinia are as much a product of their appalling society as they are of their appalling mother, and while Heyer clearly enjoys writing that society, she's not apologizing for it.
I wouldn't recommend this as an entry point into Heyer, because it isn't her best book, but if you already like her, it's worth the read.
---
*Speaking of guilty pleasures: I know that there is no intentional homoeroticism in Heyer, because on the evidence of one of her mysteries, Duplicate Death, her homophobia was virulent to the point of grotesquerie, and I know that the rather charged language of male friendship in her pre-Regency books is merely her being faithful to her source material, but all the same, I have never been able to keep from slashing Avon and Davenant,** and The Black Moth ponied up admirably with Tracy and his Davenant-analogue, Fortescue, who are just as slashable--and then there's this perfectly lovely moment, in which Tracy says to his sister, "My dear Lavinia, like all Belmanoirs, you care first for yourself and secondly for the man who masters you" (TBM 60). I tell you, the BDSM vignette, "In Which Frank Fortescue Teaches The Duke of Andover to Care for Him," practically writes itself.
**Also, as with her later novel The Corinthian, which also has a cross-dressed heroine, I suspect I shall someday fall prey to the urge to write a version of These Old Shades in which Léon is, in fact, Léon.
The thing I want to know about Black Sheep is why I've never been able to find it before, while the markedly inferior Lady of Quality is everywhere to be found. This is problematic because the two books are very much alike: both set in Bath, both with a heroine in her late twenties who has never known love (living in both cases with an older female relative who has more hair than wit), both with a hero who is middle-aged and contemptuous of society's dictates. Oh, and filthy stinking rich. Black Sheep is distinctly the better book (Lady of Quality was Heyer's last novel, and either her powers were declining or she didn't get a chance to go back and prune the purple prose, because there are stretches of it that I find embarrassing to read), and it suffered, for me, because I'd seen all its tropes before in an inferior setting. I like Abby Wendover better than Annis Wychwood and Miles Calverleigh better than Oliver Carleton, and I like Abby's ingenue niece Fanny much better than whatserface in LoQ. And I am predisposed to like Abby and Miles because, like Venetia and Damerel, what first attracts them to each other is their shared sense of the ridiculous (and yet, the two couples are quite distinct--Abby and Miles are much less likely to quote at each other).
Black Sheep has some issues in its complicated plot-and-counterplot structure, but it bounced immediately into my second tier* of Heyer favorites. If you haven't read Lady of Quality yet, read Black Sheep first. If you have read Lady of Quality, do your best to put it out of your mind. Black Sheep will reward you.
---
*After Venetia, which is hands-down my favorite, the first tier is Sprig Muslin, The Grand Sophy, and A Civil Contract; the second tier includes books like The Quiet Gentleman, Charity Girl, The Unknown Ajax, Faro's Daughter, and The Talisman Ring. So you can see that Black Sheep is in good company.
The Black Moth and Black Sheep are the two Heyer romances I have never previously been able to find. (You may imagine my glee in the dealers' room at Penguicon when I discovered them.) They make an interesting pair, and not only for the color motif in their titles.
The Black Moth is Heyer's first novel, famously written to entertain a convalescent brother when she was seventeen, and if the book as published is what she wrote as a seventeen-year-old, she was magnificently precocious and should possibly be canonized as St. Georgette, patron of teenage writers.
It is, quite obviously, her first novel. The plot depends heavily on coincidence--our hero, the Earl of Wyncham, wrongfully disgraced and now amusing himself by playing highwayman, waylays not one person he knows, not two, but three: his brother, his best friend, and his enemy, who is conveniently at that moment in the process of abducting the heroine. And Heyer doesn't quite have control of her material. The secondary couple (the earl's brother and his wife, who is the villain's sister) have far too much time center-stage (my opinion here quite possibly colored by my intense desire to drown them both in a bucket), and Heyer is clearly fascinated by her villain without quite knowing how to make him work.
That villain, Tracy Belmanoir, Duke of Andover, and his deeply dysfunctional family, is clearly a trial run for Justin Alastair, Duke of Avon, and his equally dysfunctional family, as we meet them in These Old Shades and Devil's Cub. I just reread the first chapter of TOS, and you can in fact match what Avon says about his backstory onto Andover's progress through TBM, point for point, except that she's changed all the names. Belmanoir becomes Alastair (with curious, heavy-lidded hazel eyes instead of curious, heavy-lidded green eyes); John Carstares (the Earl of Wyncham), who uses the alias Anthony Ferndale, becomes Anthony Merivale; Diana Beauleigh becomes Jennifer Beauchamp; Frank Fortescue (Belmanoir's BFF) becomes Hugh Davenant (and Tracy Belmanoir's first given name, which he apparently does not use, is Hugh); Tracy's sister Lavinia becomes Justin's sister Fanny; Tracy's brother Andrew becomes Justin's brother Rupert (and Tracy's brother Bob mercifully disappears, perhaps drowned in the bucket I brought for Lavinia and Richard?); and we can pick up and continue right along.
(I would love, btw, to know why she changed her cast from Belmanoirs to Alastairs. I can guess that one reason was the uncomfortable closeness produced by having the hero and villain of The Black Moth be brothers-in-law, especially when the villain's villainy consists in twice abducting the young lady who becomes the hero's wife, but that's only a guess.)
Tracy isn't entirely successful as a character; he's too obviously an artificial assemblage, without that deeper sense of interiority and self-judgment that makes Justin Alastair as compelling as he is. But oddly, he also has one moment of psychological depth and truth that is unlike anything else I've come across in Heyer:
"Pray do not distress yourself, Frank. I am not worth it."
"I choose to think that you are. I cannot but feel that if you had been loved as a boy--Your mother--"
"Did you ever see my mother?" inquired his Grace lazily.
"No--but--"
"Have you ever seen my sister?"
"Er--yes--"
"In a rage?"
"Really, I--"
"Because, if you have, you have seen my mother. Only she was ten times more violent. In fact, we were a pleasant party when we were all at home."
"I understand."
"Good Gad! I believe you are sorry for me?" cried Tracy scornfully.
(TBM 86-87)
Right there, just for a moment, there's a glimpse of something under all the Byronism of Andover and Avon and most especially Vidal (I love Vidal, but he is, of all Heyer's heroes, the one who is frankly a guilty pleasure, because I do know better*), the same Byronism she goes on to make fun of in Venetia and to deconstruct in Cousin Kate (really, psychopaths aren't as much fun as you think)--something shockingly real in the midst of the mannered artificiality of the book. And yet something also that isn't the point--Tracy barely thinks it's worth mentioning. I can't articulate why this affects me as strongly as it does, but it stands out very sharply for me.
The mannered artificiality, mind, is part of the fun. Despite Harlequin putting a Regency buck on the cover, this isn't a Regency; it's set in the 1740s, and not one man of the cast would dream of being seen in public with his hair cropped like that. Wigs and patches and fans, and she evokes brilliantly the deep and pervasive artificiality of England's upper crust. Tracy and his spoilt, tantrumy sister Lavinia are as much a product of their appalling society as they are of their appalling mother, and while Heyer clearly enjoys writing that society, she's not apologizing for it.
I wouldn't recommend this as an entry point into Heyer, because it isn't her best book, but if you already like her, it's worth the read.
---
*Speaking of guilty pleasures: I know that there is no intentional homoeroticism in Heyer, because on the evidence of one of her mysteries, Duplicate Death, her homophobia was virulent to the point of grotesquerie, and I know that the rather charged language of male friendship in her pre-Regency books is merely her being faithful to her source material, but all the same, I have never been able to keep from slashing Avon and Davenant,** and The Black Moth ponied up admirably with Tracy and his Davenant-analogue, Fortescue, who are just as slashable--and then there's this perfectly lovely moment, in which Tracy says to his sister, "My dear Lavinia, like all Belmanoirs, you care first for yourself and secondly for the man who masters you" (TBM 60). I tell you, the BDSM vignette, "In Which Frank Fortescue Teaches The Duke of Andover to Care for Him," practically writes itself.
**Also, as with her later novel The Corinthian, which also has a cross-dressed heroine, I suspect I shall someday fall prey to the urge to write a version of These Old Shades in which Léon is, in fact, Léon.
The thing I want to know about Black Sheep is why I've never been able to find it before, while the markedly inferior Lady of Quality is everywhere to be found. This is problematic because the two books are very much alike: both set in Bath, both with a heroine in her late twenties who has never known love (living in both cases with an older female relative who has more hair than wit), both with a hero who is middle-aged and contemptuous of society's dictates. Oh, and filthy stinking rich. Black Sheep is distinctly the better book (Lady of Quality was Heyer's last novel, and either her powers were declining or she didn't get a chance to go back and prune the purple prose, because there are stretches of it that I find embarrassing to read), and it suffered, for me, because I'd seen all its tropes before in an inferior setting. I like Abby Wendover better than Annis Wychwood and Miles Calverleigh better than Oliver Carleton, and I like Abby's ingenue niece Fanny much better than whatserface in LoQ. And I am predisposed to like Abby and Miles because, like Venetia and Damerel, what first attracts them to each other is their shared sense of the ridiculous (and yet, the two couples are quite distinct--Abby and Miles are much less likely to quote at each other).
Black Sheep has some issues in its complicated plot-and-counterplot structure, but it bounced immediately into my second tier* of Heyer favorites. If you haven't read Lady of Quality yet, read Black Sheep first. If you have read Lady of Quality, do your best to put it out of your mind. Black Sheep will reward you.
---
*After Venetia, which is hands-down my favorite, the first tier is Sprig Muslin, The Grand Sophy, and A Civil Contract; the second tier includes books like The Quiet Gentleman, Charity Girl, The Unknown Ajax, Faro's Daughter, and The Talisman Ring. So you can see that Black Sheep is in good company.
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I love Heyer's Regency and 18th-century novels so much
Date: 2009-05-14 05:17 pm (UTC)Her "other romances", like Instead of the Thorn and Helen are also oddly dead.
She spent hours, days, weeks in the British Library, private libraries, mercantile libraries and anywhere else she could track down information to make her books and characters sound more authentic, and she certainly succeeded.
To many of us, Heyer was our gateway not only into romance novels but historical fiction and 19th century novels.
To this day, little bits of the cant I learned from her still slip into my speech. Bless the woman.
Re: I love Heyer's Regency and 18th-century novels so much
Date: 2009-05-14 05:29 pm (UTC)Her non-romance historicals don't do a thing for me, beyond the respectful "you really researched the snot out of this, didn't you?"
And Penhallow was just bad.
Re: I love Heyer's Regency and 18th-century novels so much
Date: 2009-05-14 07:08 pm (UTC)Re: I love Heyer's Regency and 18th-century novels so much
Date: 2009-05-14 07:22 pm (UTC)Re: I love Heyer's Regency and 18th-century novels so much
Date: 2009-05-14 10:49 pm (UTC)And it depends on whether you consider 'subtle, brilliant and ruthless' to be sympathetic qualities.
Re: I love Heyer's Regency and 18th-century novels so much
Date: 2009-05-14 11:03 pm (UTC)Penhallow has one clearly lesbian character - the daughter, Charmian (?), who even has a girlfriend who likes pink, (alas, all of my books are in storage, so I can't verify names) and one possibly gay character, the son Aubrey, who writes clever poetry and hurls insults at everyone. And many of the characters seem to think that the youngest son, Clay, is gay, although he really just seems to be utterly useless. I can't exactly claim this as win for gay portrayals, though, given that Penhallow is such a repellent book.
Re: I love Heyer's Regency and 18th-century novels so much
Date: 2009-05-15 03:57 am (UTC)Re: I love Heyer's Regency and 18th-century novels so much
Date: 2009-05-14 07:50 pm (UTC)Re: I love Heyer's Regency and 18th-century novels so much
Date: 2009-05-14 08:00 pm (UTC)Christiana Brand's Death in High Heels has a gay character who's rather stereotyped but also sympathetic. (Unlike the unspeakable ghastliness of Ngaio Marsh's stereotyped and repulsive gay characters in Singing in the Shrouds and Death in Ecstasy.)
Re: I love Heyer's Regency and 18th-century novels so much
Date: 2009-05-14 09:45 pm (UTC)This is really funny to me because I'm pretty sure she thought of those as her best work! At least, there is a foreword in...I think it's "Lord John" but it might be "Simon the Coldheart" in which her husband says she liked those best and reviles the "brutal British tax system" which forced her to keep churning out the romances! Of course, just because her husband said it doesn't make it true, but just in case I would like to extend a warm thank you to the British tax system.
Re: I love Heyer's Regency and 18th-century novels so much
Date: 2009-05-14 09:55 pm (UTC)Re: I love Heyer's Regency and 18th-century novels so much
Date: 2009-05-14 09:58 pm (UTC)Re: I love Heyer's Regency and 18th-century novels so much
Date: 2009-05-15 04:54 pm (UTC)One of the big problems with her Medieval historicals is that she was embarrassed by religion. I don't think it's possible to paint an accurate portrait of an age of faith, where God was everywhere (whether you personally believed in him or not) without mentioning him. What I retain from Lord John (and I grant it's been decades since I read it) is a chilly, bloodless political tract with wooden characters and not so much overt emotion as would have discommoded Queen Victoria at her most unamused. Which is most ahistorical of Heyer.
I'm glad to hear the Heyers are being re-issued. I can't read The Grand Sophy in the tub any more because the pages have come adrift from the spine. Which is tantamount to a tragedy, when I'm feeling the urge.