These Old Shades - Georgette Heyer Book Club pt2

Does no one else assume (re-reading this as an adult) that Avon is bi-sexual, (friends with benefits with the obviously gay, never to marry, Davenport, but also visits brothels, and has a mistress), and that that is why when he brings home what appears to be a 12 year old boy, who is lying about his age, Davenport is so deeply horrified. Otherwise the horror doesn't quite make sense (until Davenport figures out that Leon is really Leonie).
Also gay, Rupert. He as much as confesses it to Lord Merrivale, talking about how he isn't really into women, he just pretends to chase after them so that people will think him sufficiently manly, but he really prefers "the company of men." He also never marries.

I kind of love that she has this (to me) obviously bi-sexual hero in the Duke of Avon, and then the very next thing she writes is the Masqueraders, where the hero Sir Antony Fanshawe is so confidently heterosexual that he "can tell" the our heroine Pru is a woman in disguise as a man, because he finds himself sexually attracted to/falling in love with her, and he knows himself and his sexuality so well, that he knows that therefore Peter Merriot must be a female (and it turns out he's right :-))

Just have to chime in here - this is probably my favourite GH book ever by miles. I was absolutely sure I would name my daughter Leonie (until I met a Leonie which took the name away from me - no naming after people I knew).

my mum has never read a GH - I gave her Frederica the last time she stayed with me and wanted something to read the DDs and I debated for some time as to what would be the best introduction and she read a couple of pages and decided it wasn't for her. This is the woman who reads the most ridiculous crap foisted on her by her book group then forces me to read it too. I think I may have to disown her .

Did get my own back on the book group though - I suggested they read Diana Gabaldon's Outlanders series (which is set partly where they all live except the locations are All Wrong, and is full of gratuitous middle aged sex) . Some of them got very stroppy about it, and reverted to worthy stuff

The Devil's Cub was the first GH I read at about 13 (my boyfriend's mother gave it to me to read - she told me her mother hadn't let her read GH when she was a teen). Love it. Re-read it recently but will revise so I am prepared!

why not start the thread, but have it last an extra week to give others time to catch up. Plus as its half term next week, people might be away (I'll be reading as much GH as I can manage on a sunlounger in Tenerife )

Count me in! I was SO much in lurrve with Vidal when I was 13!

Oh don't let me put you off! If you enjoy the detective stories then I'm sure you'll enjoy these! It's just that they are so different to the historical novels. Apparently GH was a very harsh critic of her own works, and obviously decided that she didn't cut it as a contemporary novelist. There is supposed to be a lot of autobiographical stuff in them as well which she was uncomfortable about after she became famous.

How interesting LapsedPacifist! I have read Instead of the Thorn, where the heroine freaks out about sex (but it's all written in a slightly evasive style so took me as a teenager a while to work out what was going on). I am still slightly tempted by the others but will bear in mind your warnings.

The early novels are available from Amazon for around £15-20. They were reprinted in hardback in the USA a few years ago. I bought a couple for Aged Mama, who at 83 is disinclined to read anything by unfamiliar authors and rarely reads anything other than GH these days.

The 1920s slang and the appalling snobbery and class-conciousness (entirely typical of the times of course - see Agatha Christie for example) make for a tough read at times. The themes and plots are based around "social issues" which appear rather strange nowadays. One is a tragedy about a young woman from a humble background who marries "above" herself and another has a heroine who freaks out about sex on her wedding night and runs away from her husband.

Frankly my dears, they were pretty awful haven't aged well, but they certainly have novelty value.

I have read The Great Roxhythe and think LapsedPacifist's link is spot on.

For years I have been meaning to go to the BL to read GH's early contemporary novels. This thread may have finally inspired me to do it. I will report back!

No - it's not Beauvallet - it is The Great Roxhythe! I'm about to click your link Lapsed, I may be some time...

I found some Jeffrey Farnols in a box when we cleared out after a very elderly great-aunt died, dear god they were turgid. I think Beauvallet was the very first GH I did read, one particularly boring summer rainy day at about 13, may I have a small prize for having the courage to read more GH after that experience?

Beauvallet is a very early GH novel (1929) set in Elizabethan times, with a swashbuckling pirate hero. It's not "missing" though, I got my copy from the public library about 40 years ago although it might not be in print ATM. It isn't a patch on most of her books - the Elizabethan stylee language is pretty stilted and owes (as do a lot of her earliest books) a great deal to the early 20th century historical writer Jeffrey Farnol.

You might be thinking of "The Great Roxhythe" (1923) , which GH supressed and subsequently firmly resisted ANY attempts to get it reprinted more about the book here.

I was always curious about why she was so determined to see the book lost and buried forever, until I came across a very funny discussion about it on a slash fiction forum (not that I normally frequent such places you understand ). TGR is apparently incredibly camp and v.v gay - the title character is a charismatic courtier in the time of Charles II and the hero is his utterly smitten and devoted secretary. The language used to describe their relationship in the book is vair vair fruity and OTT, and the story goes that GH was actually very young when she wrote the book, and was quite innocent about the implications of her characters' relationship. It was only with the hindsight of maturity that she realised just how ambigious (and hilarious ) much of the dialogue appeared, and the book accordingly became a huge source of embarassment to her.

I remember that scene LadyD, it's pretty well the first time any GH character shows any sort of mature emotion!
I'm trying to read The Conqueror as part of an heroic attempt to read everything she ever wrote , but it's damned hard work.
Anyone other than me ever find her missing early novel, something about a pirate? I think it's in Wikimedia Commons somewhere.

Does no one else think that Avon genuinely did love Leonie and did what he could to persuade her not to love him? I've always found the final chapter, when he goes to the cure's house and tells her DeSV is dead, quite moving. I can't remember the actual line off the top of my head but he tells her that he isn't good enough for her, that he has done some dreadful things in his past and she deserves better than him. Her response is something along the lines of 'I'd rather be the last woman in your life than the first' which always leaves me with a little lump in my throat .

He also seems (to me anyway) to move on from simply wanting to get revenge on DSV for other, more obscure demeanours to actually doing it for Leonie's sake.

Maybe I'm giving him attributes he doesn't possess but I honestly think he falls as much in love with Leonie as she does with him.

Yes, the bit where Worth threatens to horsewhip Judith is really quite teeth-gritting. But it was written in the 1920s and (as with Devil's Cub) one really does have to make allowances given how GH's attitudes developed subsequently.

Regency Buck . I know it was her first Regency novel, and she hadn't found her "tone" yet, but it really is my least favourite and one of the very few I never re-read.

In The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer used "Regency Buck" as an example of everything that is anti-feminist in "women's" (romantic) fiction, and she chose a work by Georgette Heyer because her novels were considered to be more highbrow and intelligent than most of the genre. I wonder if GG would have come to the same conclusions about GH as a writer if she'd chosen to analyse The Grand Sophy or Venetia?