Georgette Heyer (1902–1974) is widely regarded as ‘the creator of the Regency genre of historical romance’. [...] This association with the Regency romance though has often obscured or minimised the diversity of her output, the generic instability of many of her novels and her frequent recourse to the gothic. Heyer wrote not only romances but detectives, psychological studies, historical novels and contemporary fiction and her work showcases the multivalent ways in which popular fiction deployed the gothic beyond a superficial appropriation of gothic tropes. A close study of several of Heyer’s most obviously gothic texts will, in the first part of the essay, showcase certain modalities of Heyer’s gothic. The second half will focus specifically on Heyer’s romance work and will map out similar, although often more subtle, gothic strategies. An overview of Heyer’s romance work challenges the commonly held formulaic conception of the gothic romance. Her extensive borrowing from eighteenth and early nineteenth gothic tropes and interaction with a range of historical and contemporary gothic sources also challenges a linear concept of the development of gothic romance and the gothic romance hero. (373)
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Night at the Inn (1950) is alone among her short stories in deploying the gothic and specifically the horror gothic. It is tempting to think of it [...] as, to some extent, a failed experiment. It is certainly one of the more tonally jarring of her pieces. The attempt to combine a light-hearted ‘meet-cute’ romance and a gothic serial killer sit uneasily together. (377)
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Cousin Kate (1968) is the Heyer romance most readily identifiable with the formulaic conception of the gothic romance. (382)
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the gothic is more overtly deployed in Heyer’s early work. These Old Shades is the second book [in] a connected gothic trilogy of her earliest works—The Black Moth (1921), These Old Shades (1926) and Devil’s Cub (1932). (383)
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The Quiet Gentleman spends little time on the romance and focuses on a mystery of equal or greater weight in terms of both thematic importance and narrative time. Gervase and Drusilla rarely appear together on the page. The novel’s focus is Gervase’s unwelcome return to the family home and the numerous attempts on his life. A similar divided focus is a significant feature of her gothic romances. The Reluctant Widow (1946) is a tale of murder, spies and secret-selling. The Toll Gate (1954) involves a murderous criminal gang and a missing treasure. Such sub-plots, though not always so dominant, occur in the majority of her fiction, introducing a gothic element into her romances. In Regency Buck (1935), for example, there is a tale of abduction and betrayal and in The Corinthian (1940) there is a stolen necklace mystery and a brutal murder. (385-386)
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Sylvester (1957) revolves around the intertextual mirroring of Caroline Lamb’s gothic roman-a-clef Glenarvon; The Reluctant Widow references Charlotte Smith and Clara Reeve and the female gothic narrative of the entrapped female; Regency Buck alludes to Horrid Mysteries, Midnight Bells, Mrs. Radclyffe’s novels and ‘Monk’ Lewis, setting the stage for the betrayal and abduction of its closing chapters. A similar function is fulfilled by the use of gothic aesthetics and locations. This is most notable in The Quiet Gentleman in the house built by ‘one of Mr. Walpole’s more fervid adherents’ in the ‘Gothick’ style and resembling nothing so much as a ‘rabbit-warren’. (386)
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