Tom Zille delves into Heyer’s archives to study the way in which she pieced her Regency world together through research. He examines the stylistic differences in Regency language choice across her oeuvre. (11)
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One of the qualities of Heyer’s novels which critics have consistently highlighted is their ostensible historical authenticity, a quality the author strove to achieve on the linguistic level as on any other. This is especially true of the idiom she created for her Regency romances in which, as her colleague Carola Oman put it, ‘not one word was false, or out of place’. And while historiography in Heyer’s own lifetime began to abandon the concept of history at which her attempts at authenticity aimed, writers of historical fiction, herself included, were often slow to respond to such paradigm shifts. (187)
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While Heyer took a conservative approach to history, this chapter will show that the idiom she created for the Regency novels was thoroughly innovative; it may well be her most original contribution to the genre. To this end, the chapter will examine Heyer’s historical idiom in the 26 romances set in the Regency period, from Regency Buck (1935) to Lady of Quality (1972), the largest and most distinct part of her oeuvre, with particular attention given to her ‘Regency slang’. In doing so it will draw not only on the novels, but also on Heyer’s private papers. The aim is to trace the sources and influences that impacted on the genesis of Heyer’s historical idiom and so put her stylistic innovation in the broader context of her own development as a writer and the development of the genre of historical fiction.
In addition, this chapter will assess the historical ‘faithfulness’ and effectiveness of Heyer’s historical language against both her own aims and her literary environment. In keeping with this dual focus, the methods used here incorporate elements of close reading as well as the analytical tools of the approach that has come to be known as ‘corpus stylistics’, i.e. the application of the methods of corpus linguistics to literary texts (the more traditional terms would be ‘statistical stylistics’ or ‘stylometry’). In providing the first comprehensive analysis of Heyer’s historical idiom, the chapter will not only investigate a key element of her writing, but also illustrate how an investigation of a ‘language of the historical novel’ could begin. (188)
From the introduction to the volume:
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