Georgette Heyer: A Critical Retrospective, by Mary Fahnestock-Thomas

I received a copy of this today in the post: a late Christmas present, and the cause of much joyful yelling. It has three short stories by Heyer in it - two of which I have never read before, and I haven't yet read them either! Even though the book has been in my possession for nearly twelve hours. You see, reading them would whittle at my already very short list of unread-Heyer-stories ... I'm going to save and savour them. And then I shall report back here on them. ;)

The book also contains a huge collection of reviews of Heyer's books, and three essays by her which I'll try and review later, and generally shinies and shininess. ^_^

~ E

Oh! Mary Fahnestock-Thomas has won my admiration forever with this sentence:

~ E

So this is a book you would definitely recommend, yes?

Definitely. It's got three short stories and three essays by Heyer (one of the short stories is available online - Pursuit), an enormous collection of reviews of her books, reviews of adaptations (like plays) of her novels, and several articles discussing her work from various angles (discussion of the oft-made comparison to Austen, for example, and a surprising number discussing her mysteries). Although there's some writing by Fahnestock-Thomas, she makes it clear that the book is a collection and a labour of love - a collection of material so that readers can draw their own opinions. It's all extremely interesting. :)

~ E

Wow, that sounds amazing, really!!
I just wish my lovely engl teacher would show enough thought and care to read such a book and be able to atleast try to understand it (as well as Heyer's worth).

I've read the short stories now. Both of them were wonderful reads. A Proposal for Cicely was particularly interesting because it was, as far as I can tell, the second piece of fiction which Heyer published - right after The Black Moth. It's a contemporary story - set in the early 1920s, when it was written - very light and charming. Not, perhaps, done with the finesse that Heyer later developed, but I found it most interesting because you can see where Heyer was starting from, and see echoes of things that cropped up in her later writing.

Runaway Match was an absolutely brilliant Regency short story. It starts with a premise that I found slightly similar to The Masqueraders - a young woman running away from a marriage with a friend of her father's, but the friend of her father's comnig after her. However, there's a twist which I absolutely did not see coming and which I thought very shiny indeed. :D Which contrasts with another short story of hers, Pursuit (available to read online - the link is in the Discussing the Books forum), where I feel that - although it's a good story - it's not quite as lively as the short stories collected in Pistols for Two. Runaway Match had far more of that bright, swift, clever mood.

~ E