My online book club’s choice for August was Frederica by Georgette Heyer.  I practically lived on Heyer when I was a teenager and this is one (of many) which I read over and over again.  It has been several years though since I read one of her Regency novels (although I have read some of her detective stories more recently) so I was very excited to pick one back up.

It was wonderful to be back in Heyer’s world.  I had forgotten just how much I loved reading these books and I was immediately drawn back to a very comforting place with characters I really cared about.  Heyer’s books are just lovely stories and are above all funny – Frederica has what must be the best non-proposal scene in literature.

Many of the readers in our group had issues with the amount of Regency slang used in the book but I have to confess that I didn’t even notice most of it.  I still haven’t quite worked out whether that is a cultural thing (only a handful of us are from the UK – do we still use any of these words?) or whether I have just read too many of the books, although I suspect it is the latter!

I would have said that Georgette Heyer was the perfect read for anyone who loves Jane Austen but there were a few in the group who found it too slow for them and couldn’t finish it.  Frederica is not perhaps the fasted paced of her novels and if you want a bit more action it might be worth starting with something like The Reluctant Widow or The Unknown Ajax which, incidentally, has the funniest final scene – it belongs on the stage in a farce.

The romance aspect does always tend to be a slow burner.  Heyer is credited with creating the whole Regency romance genre (Barbara Cartland is known to have copied her) but really her books are so much more than ‘just’ romances.  They are comedies of manners and are all about the relationships between many different characters.  Heyer is all too often written off as only a writer of romances for women.  Of course, there is nothing wrong with romances but giving books that label does tend to limit their readership.

Georgette Heyer deserves to be much more widely recognised, if only for the incredible amount of research she put into her books.  A great deal of what I know about Regency England was gleaned from the pages of her books and I firmly believe that there is so much variety in her books that there is at least one of them for everyone.  That goes for men too – I once got my Dad to read The Unknown Ajax and he enjoyed it very much.  It is all about finding the right book for you.