Georgette Heyer is perhaps one of the most famous, or infamous, if you prefer, names surrounding the historical romance genre. In fact, she is often credited with starting the genre. Many a romance lover grew up reading her work. Others might not have heard of her, but have no doubt read historical romances designed in her image of Regency England (and other time periods).
Heyer is the author responsible for the historical romance as we know it today: epic romances featuring swashbuckling lords fighting duels and ladies in gorgeous gowns swanning around ballrooms in search of a husband. There is intrigue. There is witty banter. There is kissing. Sometimes there is even fainting. What’s not to love?
Well, I’ll tell you. Much of the romantic world Heyer constructed is framed as a white utopia divorced from the historical realities of the day. In fact, so much of the luxury of Heyer’s world is dependant on the erasure or minimization of people with marginalized identities within her stories, not to mention the erasure of the complex political and social context of the times. It’s not all balls and duels, people!
And yet, so many later historical romances perpetuate the same classicist, racist, ableist, and heteronormative fantasy birthed from Heyer’s mind. In fact, I’m coming to see that the courtship novels that inspired many a historical romance are, in many ways, much more progressive than the texts they inspire. I was marinating on this idea when I came across an audiobook version of Georgette Heyer’s Venetia. It was narrated by Richard Armitage of BBC’s North & South (2004) fame. The agenda couldn’t have been clearer: to get fans of the now-iconic BBC mini-series based on Elizabeth Gaskell’s Victorian social novel interested in Heyer’s work. Surely, we would also love Heyer since she wrote love stories that took place around Gaskell’s time.
Yet the two authors couldn’t be more different. Gaskell was directly and explicitly writing about the politics and social upheaval of her time. She grew up in a progressive household and went on to live a more progressive life with her husband, writing, raising children, and doing her social justice work. North & South is as much a story about the evils of Industrialization, class conflict, religious dissent, and changing social hierarchies as it is about love. Heyer’s worlds, on the other hand, explicitly ignore those historical realities or only tangentially acknowledge them in favor of the glamorously romanticized lives of the aristocracy. But in the minds of many, there is no clear difference between historical romances and courtship novels simply because they are both about romance and the things that happen behind closed doors.
Dr. Sam Hirst does a spectacular job of unpacking Heyer’s legacy in the romance genre and lovingly explores how we can both appreciate, even love, an author while also being critical of where they fall short. As they say in their lecture, Heyer not only passed on a love for stories of the past and laid the foundation for historical romance worlds but also passed on narrative frames that excluded, villainized, or marginalized people with marginalized identities. Thankfully, many authors are moving beyond that limited framework and exploring just how complex, engaging, and inclusive the genre can be.
Guest Lecturer Bio
Dr. Sam Hirst is a Teaching Fellow at Liverpool University. They work on the early Gothic and 20th-century romance and have published on the Gothic romance and Georgette Heyer. They run the online program Romancing the Gothic.
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