Georgette Heyer, history, and historical fiction

The review discusses a volume of scholarly articles edited by Samantha Rayner and Kim Wilkins that sets out to present a comprehensive body of research into the oeuvre of the English novelist Georgette Heyer. The book comprises several sections: gender, genre, sources, and circulation and reception. Heyer is the renowned founder of Regency romance, whose work is noted for exceptional attention to historical facts and reconstruction of the aristocratic slang of the period. Her novels, however, remained largely ignored by scholars. The volume’s editors succeed in producing an invaluable compilation enriching the studies of 1920s English genre literature by considering Heyer’s work in the context of post-war culture, with its heightened interest in the Napoleonic era, as well as in relation to literary tradition, especially Jane Austen’s works, but also referencing adventure novels of Heyer’s older contemporaries Baroness Orczy and Rafael Sabatini.