These Old Shades - Georgette Heyer Book Club pt2

[PrematurelyAirconditioned]

Surely you must have read it by now?

To start us off, I think the thing that struck me most reading it back to back with Black Moth was how exactly she'd transposed the characters from BM. Andover's conventional best friend, his frivolous brother and sister, his boring brother-in-law, the woman he abducted, and her husband (complete with watered-down highwayman past) are all there, just as before, and it makes the melodramatic plot of These Old Shades infinitely more fun.

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!

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

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).

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 :-))