Fantasy and Regency Romances

The problem with having been a voracious reader for decades is that one sometimes can be accused of being too rarefied in taste. But then I don't want to impugn anyone's taste if they happen to like books I don't like. So I guess I should say that this riff is really about perspective--the perspective of a fifty-something long-time reader.

That said, I'll address other world fantasy first.

Anyone who likes this type of tale ought to read J.R.R. Tolkien's essay On Fairy Stories. In it, he talks about why fantasy works for the reader--why people come back to it again and again. He also talks about the process of subcreation.

I won't get into his points here; he's a genius, and he says it better. What I can add--being, obviously, no genius--are my own observations. What Tolkien and I share in common is one thing (well, perhaps two--a deep love of the beauties of nature, without any desire to master the categories of botany) which is the process of creation over a very long period.

When a story is done, I want to know why, why, why. Why do they dress that way? Why is the weather this way? What is this land's relation to its neighbors--and how has it changed over its own history? What happens to your psyche when you've lived through world-changing adventures? You can ask these why questions endlessly, and never be done doing the research, and the thinking, that leads to answers. But what does happen is that you eventually accrete enough data to form a world that really is internally consistent; you also extrapolate cultural change in ways that hold up a mirror to ourselves, but shift the angle--this way, that way--so we can see our own culture from a different perspective. That's the kind of fantasy novel that will instantly grab me--ones such as Kate Elliott's Crown of Stars novels.

I have trouble getting into books that don't come at storytelling the same way: thus I find unconvincing and therefore uninteresting thieves guilds without any apparent thought about the people from whom the thieves are stealing (surely the world is not ALL bad guys who deserve their things taken?). Or that depict desert worlds with gigantic cities and apparently magical water and sewers. That give the reader worlds in which everyone wears colorful costumes but thinks and talks like the Americans of today. And likewise the "Evil Men/Powerful Women" worlds, or the world of Evial Red Priests and Bad Religion whose single purpose is to oppress hapless peasants. (Making me wonder what are their church services like, do they have coffee hour afterward, and kick around puppies?)

Sarcasm aside, I'm glad when I see young people reading and delighting in any novels, whether I like them or not, because first of all, I like to see young people reading. Also, I don't believe that fantasies that may not be my cuppa in worldbuilding or characterization or other aspects are hackwork. My experience with young readers has convinced me that an appealing story has something to say to someone, even if it isn't me. I think every author has good things to say, or at least important things to say if they reject the notion of 'good'. Mercedes Lackey, whose stories don't pull me in, but my students often love them, campaigns indefatigably for the different, the unwanted, the minority. Many of the writers who aren't my faves still support the Romantic ideals that I like: honor, truth, effort, justice. Then there are Marxist writers like China Mieville, for whom working class determinism is the only possible heroic stance. I don't think there can be too much debate on these subjects--we have only to look around us and see that there's a frightening dearth in our present-day leadership and culture; how long are we going to sacrifice the environment and fundamental human rights in favor of industrial-level greed?

I have similar issues with Regency novels--which are another form of subcreation. (More on that anon.) Of late, the authors do seem to be researching dilligently the politics, social trappings, and geography of the 19th century. (Regency writers of twenty years ago, hard on the heels of Heyer's enormous success, didn't often do the homework, and their books were replete with egregious errors.) But I see far too few of these authors getting the mindset of the 19th century right, or the language. The stories, therefore, seem contrived, and too frequently where there ought to be wit there is instead melodrama (abductions and smugglers and spies and so forth) or, worse, sex as plotpoint. The characters bedhop like a bunch of nineties people in Regency garb, and that's just not convincing.

After having read as much period material as I have, I find it difficult to reread some of Heyer's novels, partly because of the complacent anti-Semitism, and partly because I can see where she tweaked the times to her own tastes, for instance the overuse of Pierce Egan's slang. Not only did young women not use it, ever, even in letters to each other (the different language of men and women at the time is a subject to ponder) but young men of the upper classes did not employ it to the degree that she has them blithely slinging out to each other--and to young ladies. But she liked it, and so uses it in what, in effect, is a secondary universe that she created out of England's real regency period, a time of horrific injustice and economic and political upheaval.

Heyer's heroines are readable to us because they are actually the prototypes of modern young women. That is, they seem less like actual Regency era young women, and much more like the aristoctatic Bright Young Things of the twenties (dressing like men--and the men find it a turnon--and using male slang, assuming a kind of cool independence) who were daring in limited ways, but still believed firmly in their grandmothers' precepts about ladies and Blood Will Always Tell. From the perspective of our end of the century, unless one has done a great deal of reading in real period literature, those Heyer heroines seem like Regency heroines in their meticulously researched clothing and bonnets, but they aren't. To point up an easy proof: get ahold of Claire Claremont's journal or letters. She was about the freest spirit of the Regency period, but she doesn't even remotely talk or behave like a Heyer heroine, much less Mary Shelley, who was at heart a conservative, despite the way she was raised. She was also wonderfully complex, and Heyer's great strength is her plotting and humor; her characters are pretty much types (she even admitted it, calling her heroes Mark I and Mark II) with superficial differences. They seldom have depth: her attempt at a 'serious' Regency, about ordinary people (A Civil Contract) reads to me like melodrama, with a lot of just the sort of ranting that Austen pillories in a couple of her books.

Heyer is successful also because she did do the research, immersing herself into literature of the period, and she meticulously thought out all the aspects, drawing knowledgeably on what made Jane Austen so popular for so many readers: the agreeable life of the gentry and aristocracy, the tranquil existence that never sees the horror and anguish and squalor of the manufacturing cities and the portside towns. Heyer created another England, one that doesn't have the blood and misery and tears behind it and ahead of it that the real one did. When Heyer does permit the ugliness to enter a novel (Arabella) she wisely confines it to single instances that she can have her heroine solve, then she whisks the evidence out of the way so that the reader stays firmly in her secondary universe, and does not start thinking about the tragedies of the reality.

Regency novels that do take into consideration the grim realities of the time don't really work either (see Sandra Heath) because they then become Problem Novels. The reader who wants to escape the anxieties of our time doesn't really look to have her face rubbed into those of the earlier period, and the romance is seldom strong enough to overcome the heavy dose of ugly reality.

It has been pointed out that Regency romances are a specific subgenre--and that their readers expect the plot to follow the same general lines as Heyer laid down, the characters to resemble her types, Heyer's distinctive slang to be faithfully reproduced. I have no argument there: people who love Heyer's novels know that there can never be any new ones, and so they turn to authors who write similar books in order to extend the pleasure they find in the originals.

What I hope to engender by this discussion is an interest in the literature of the period. Jane Austen invented the modern novel, she's brilliant. If a person has read enough Heyer and others who emulate her, he or she ought not to find Austen's language impenetrable, and will probably be able to comprehend the wit. Anyone who loves, say, Friday's Child ought to laugh out loud at the absurdities of Mrs. Norris, or enjoy the sly selfishness of Isabella Thorpe--or recognize how John Dashwood, so continually worried about his position in society, becomes more servile than his servants.

There is something about the Regency period that attracts. I think it's partly the personalities (Caro Lamb can make one laugh at loud with her double Mary-Sue* Glenarvon in which she skewers with glee every one of the high ranking people she knew personally, to their gasping dismay and fulminating rage when the book came out--and sold out). It is also because this was a time when there was less polarization between the classes than one would assume, but also there persisted the Enlightenment idea that life must be artistically lived. It would simply not have been possible to force men into dull gray suits as we saw all through the twentieth century, or into ugly houses that emphasize a misplaced practicality. Bulwer-Lytton later tried to disavow his wickedly funny Regency Novel Pelham because of the gleefully immoral but ever so artistic Pelham family, but what he did was kick off the subgenre, one that made writers like Catherine Grace Gore famous during the 1840s for her Regency novels. Georgette Heyer did not invent the form, she just rejuvenated for the 20th century reader what was already there; the Regency novels used to be called Silver Fork novels all during the 19th century, and they were such a staple that Wodehouse makes fun of them in a novel printed when Heyer was still a schoolgirl.

* Mary Sue is a science fiction fandom term for a popular form of home produced Star Trek fiction that first emerged in the 1970s. In it, young writers, mostly women, projected themselves as Ensign Mary Sue, the beautiful brilliant adjunct to Spock and or Kirk with whom everyone was in love, who saves the Enterprise (and the Federation) and who, often as not, dies with dramatic tragedy at the end, because the author knows she has to restore the Trek characters to their universe instead of have them live happily ever after with her alter ego. Caro Lamb doesn't just put herself into her novel once, but twice--once as the helpless innocent (with whom everyone is in love) and also as the Byronically tragic female war leader. The first gets the conventional tragic deathbed scene of heroines pure in heart, the other a Byronically dramatic death as she rides off a cliff. But beware--modern readers will feel sorry for the horse.