She had to recreate it from scratch, and she did.

Heyer has been criticized in some quarters for the overwhelming barrage of period detail in her books, but it seems important to remember that in a time before a thousand and one Austen adaptations and the entire genre of “historicals” that Heyer invented, we had no mental image of this world. But all are characterized by their real wit, fully realized characters, and utterly satisfying conclusions. One biographer defined these as the “saturnine male lead, the marriage in danger, the extravagant wife, and the group of idle, entertaining young men.” To this I would add a mad chase at the book’s end, which oftentimes brings together disparate characters at a remote and random inn. While devotees will argue passionately for their favorite Heyers (mine, not that you asked, are Cotillion, Devil’s Cub, and, of course, The Grand Sophy-I don’t like the May-December jaded-rakes ones) it can’t be denied that there are certain recurring tropes in her work. (In addition to the Regency, Heyer set books in the Georgian and Medieval periods she also wrote modern mysteries.) Her files contained subject headings like “Beauty, Colours, Dress, Hats, Household, Prices, and Shops.” Heyer was a famously scrupulous researcher with a vast archive of materials and detailed notes on all aspects of the eras she portrayed. Something popular is “all the crack.” Exaggeration becomes “doing it much too brown.” A young relative fresh from the sticks “needs a little town bronze.” A snob is “high in the instep.” And our favorite, of course, is “impervious to the most brutal snubs,” a phrase which one finds applicable with dismaying frequency.

As my mother had, I read all of the books in my early teens, and even today, our exchanges are liberally peppered with the idiosyncratic language of Heyer’s novels-or, as she might put it, “Regency cant.” Like most families, mine makes frequent use of shorthand. In the case of me and my mother, much of the talk derives from the work of Georgette Heyer, the prolific author who created the genre of Regency Romance in the first half of the twentieth century.

The unknown ajax by georgette heyer