Georgette Heyer’s fame, both in her own time and in ours, is inextricably connected to her representation of Regency England. However before Heyer wrote about Regency, she was writing about the eighteenth century, setting her first six novels across the eighteenth century in both England and France. In this chapter, I consider Heyer’s representation of the eighteenth century at a time of extremes: a time marked, both by radical possibility and aristocratic decadence and violence. The men of Heyer’s eighteenth century, elaborately dressed in all manner of frills, jewels, wigs and vibrant colours, have considerably more latitude for display than their Regency brothers, who must conform to the rigid standards of masculinity embodied by Beau Brummell. Heyer’s eighteenth-century novels are also notable for their gender play, with cross-dressing heroes and heroines proliferating the narratives in ways not often possible in her latest novels. However, the eighteenth century is also represented as a time of casual violence. Herey’s eighteenth-century heroes think nothing of murder, gamble their entire fortunes in an evening, and have an acute sense of their own untrammeled power within the social worlds over which they rule. These characteristics that become rather more muted in Heyer’s later Regency heroes, who might have a reputation for danger, but are, in fact, much more prosaic and, crucially, safe, as their heroines discover. Far more so than Heyer’s Regency world, Heyer’s eighteenth century is fundamentally unruly. Romance in Heyer’s eighteenth-century novels is thus figured as one of the few safe spaces for women, even while the heroes of these novels are radically, spectacularly unsafe. I argue that one of the reasons that the Regency became Heyer’s most popular setting was the comparative safety of the Regency world she creates: a much calmer locale then the decadent eighteenth-century world of her earlier novels.
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