The ideal of a benign stability within families is shown to be as vulnerable to disruption as dreams of the perfect romance coupling, compromised by the power struggles that she shows to be endemic in family life. This essay tracks a creative tension that emerges in formal instabilities and in terms of content, what Heyer includes, what she leaves out, and what is still yet apparent through its traces. Her novels also push against the constraints of genre, particularly in relation to the things - surveillance and male violence, syphilis, incarceration of those wrongfully deemed to be insane, the spoils of empire - that romance must leave out or downplay in order that the prospect of the “happy ever after” it promises can be fulfilled. Abstract: Georgette Heyer wrote some of the most celebrated and popular historical romances ever published.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |