Kim Sherwood shows how Heyer has been positioned as both a genre romance writer (with comparisons to Barbara Cartland) and as a writer of consequence in English literature (evoking comparisons with Austen, and ultimately resulting in her long-overdue blue plaque). But Heyer’s novels themselves question this binary between popular or genre fiction and worthy literature, in intelligent and self-aware ways. (10-11)
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Enjoying a Georgette Heyer novel was described as ‘the next best thing to reading Jane Austen’ in a 1967 Publishers Weekly review. But another review, in the New York Herald Tribune in 1964, accused her of ‘recreating in miniature those gooey marble-backed novels ... read by Jane Austen’s flightiest heroines’. In this chapter I will argue that Heyer’s work directly addresses this critical binary through the tactics of metafiction. (75)
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Focusing on Sylvester, or The Wicked Uncle (1957) and Venetia(1958), this chapter illustrates the prominence of metafiction in Heyer’s work. It then explores the ways in which, at the midpoint of her career, she uses metafiction to participate in critical and cultural debates surrounding historical romance. Such debates are rooted in genre and in gender: both the widespread dismissal of historical romance by critics and academics, and the widespread marginalisation of women writers by critics and academics. (76)
From the introduction to the volume:
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