Holly Hirst reads Heyer against the Gothic tradition, arguing that Heyer periodically reaches into this genre but troubles the Gothic romance Ur-plot of brooding heroes and mouldering country houses. (11)
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The novels of Georgette Heyer, though rarely categorised as ‘gothics’, offer a useful rebuttal to [...] formulaic conceptions of the intersection of the Gothic and the romance: a less dismissive conception of the Gothic romance. (105)
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It is all too easy to miss the Gothic quality of many of Heyer’s novels if we rely on the dominant discourses of either romance or Gothic scholarship: respectively, an Ur-plot based definition of the ‘gothics’ as a publishing category or a terror-orientated definition that treats romance in the genre as of little merit or relevance. Heyer’s light comedy and ‘closed’ happy endings (the story is resolved, happy ever after for all!) are often perceived as antithetical to the Gothic mode. However, what we find in Heyer is a different understanding of the Gothic and its possibilities in both uncovering and laying threats. She offers, frequently, a form of ‘Austenian Gothic’ that mirrors the devices of Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818), in which Catherine Morland’s wild Gothic misreading of the world points unerringly to the underlying ‘mundanely’ Gothic reality of, for example, spousal abuse and the intrinsic threat of societal power structures to those outside them. (108)
From the introduction to the volume:
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