Venetia: Georgette Heyer’s Pastoral Romance

Publication year
2020
Journal
Journal of Popular Romance Studies
Volume
9
Comment

Here's the abstract:

Georgette Heyer's Venetia (1958) is Heyer's most complex, literary, and also physically sensuous and emotional work, in being a combination of the formulas and style of Heyer's usual Regency romances and the conventions and themes of the literary genre of the pastoral romance. Heyer makes her use of the pastoral genre explicit, in her rake-hero's references, as he breaks off with Venetia, to their love affair as having been a temporary idyll in Arcadia--the traditional location of the pastoral; and the novel's character types, plot, emphasis on the natural world, and figurative language, together with a heightened artifice of writing style through much use of literary quotation, all come from the adaptation of pastoral romance to the typical conventions, manners, and style of Heyer's Regency novels.