Eat Your Vegetables

Fair-use image from Wikipedia

When I was a child, and lost (as children ought to lose) the battle with my parents about the sorts of foods one was expected to eat, I developed a strategy for dealing with unpleasant flavours or textures. That strategy was basically to get the worst of things out of the way quickly. Eat all of the bloody Swiss chard and all of the badly frozen, starchy corn, at the very beginning of the meal, as quickly as possible. Once that was out of the way, the rest of the meal could be enjoyed.

As mentioned previously, I am engaged in my annual re-reading of the historical novels of Georgette Heyer. And I have found myself following the strategy once again, albeit without intending it.

I decided, at the turn of the new year, that I would read all of the novels we have* in the order of publication. Previously, I have tended to begin with my favourites and then work my way through the shelves, until I end up staring owlishly at a handful of books I don't much care for. This time is different.

And this first month has, I'm afraid, been a challenge. Heyer is best-known for her social comedies set during the Georgian Regency. But she published her first novel in 1921 (at the age of nineteen!), and didn't publish her first Regency until 1935. By which time she had published seventeen other novels, many of them historical fiction but some in contemporary settings, including the first of her mysteries.

Many of these earlier books, I'm sorry to say, are not very good. Heyer herself suppressed a number of them, and I don't blame her. Simon the Coldheart, for instance, is nearly as melodramatic as is The Black Moth, but with the added disadvantage of a style of dialogue that can best be described as Forsoothly, ecod. As Jane Aiken Hodge put it so politely in her biography, The Private World of Georgette Heyer, "The speech of the Middle Ages always defeated Georgette Heyer." As did the speech of the Jacobethan period.

But with The Conqueror finally finished I am past the kale component of this project, and, with Devil's Cub, engaged with the best of her work. February's going to be a fun month.

*We have never owned the novels set in the 1920s, and we disposed of our copies of Royal Escape and My Lord John, for what I trust are obvious reasons. We have a very badly produced edition of The Great Roxhythe but it has defeated all my efforts to read it, and so alas, back to the basement it goes.