Jennifer Clement explores Heyer’s inversion of the marriage plot in A Civil Contract.In this work Heyer appears to query the plotting and emotional expectations of traditional romantic novels, in which femininity is shown to be a performance that is emotionally hypocritical. (11)
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A Civil Contract is in fact the novel where Heyer most clearly analyses what romance is, and what it means to write narratives based on improbable dreams of romantic love. In this novel Heyer explicitly draws on Jane Austen’s books – not as narratives of romance, but rather as realist novels very much concerned with the practicalities of life and the need for substantial amounts of money to sustain the upper-class lifestyle on which both authors focus. She thus challenges the often-traced genealogy by which Austen is claimed as an ancestor of the romance novel, suggesting instead that Austen’s more important legacy is as a realist novelist of manners and a sharp delineator of the need for emotional hypocrisy in social life, particularly for women.
In this chapter I draw on Heyer’s use of Austen to support my main argument, which is that A Civil Contract gives us both positive and negative portrayals of emotional hypocrisy through its inversion of the marriage plot, and that positive hypocrisy in this novel should be understood as a kind of generosity, a gift from one character to another. (88-89)
From the introduction to the volume:
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