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mildly feminist role model however it s her talent for organising and for getting the information she needs to deal with a situation there is a very funny scene where she goes to visit a money lender the politically correct might quite reasonably object to this man s portrayal half of it is comedy but heyer has sophy know the law when it comes to lending to a minor and how items pledged for security should be treated and i find this capable business like attitude encouraging horses frighten me getting good advice however is always useful this is classic heyer not without the odd fault but overall warm witty and clever my 14 and 40 year old self look on it with equal approval posted by desperate reader at 10 08 pm 6 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels georgette heyer monday august 19 2013 if it wasn t for georgette heyer yes here it is another heyer related post better get used to it as i m happily rediscovering more and more of her books i sometimes feel a bit self conscious about my love of heyer people can be a bit sniffy about her so it s tempting to think of her as a guilty pleasure but then i ll be damned if i feel guilty about reading a writer who has given me so much pleasure over the years i ve always been interested in history always loved reading a complete lack of skill in trying to learn other languages would always have pushed me to british history and i would always have discovered jane austen although it was very specifically heyer s mentions of austen which led me to discover her when i did my degree was in history of art my undergraduate dissertation about the rival art collections of wellington and napoleon the difference is that wellington as the victor got to keep his booty including a 3 meter high statue of a naked napoleon holding an orb with a winged victory on it by canova hard to imagine that wellington would have really wanted such an object but it still stands in a stairwell in apsley house was in partly the fruition of an interest sparked by reading heyer s army based novels for me and doubtless very many others she s been a gateway novelist not to the endless regencies which are so often second or third rate imitations of what she dis so well but to the classics that she was undoubtedly familiar with and many of which she mentions in her novels a quick trawl around my shelves has resulted in a sizable pile of books which owe their place on my shelf because of heyer i haven t included non fiction and could have included elizabeth gaskell who i started reading when i was looking for a heyer replacement i haven t read all of these books but one day i will well maybe not the monk which i started once and didn t really get on with i did actually read richardson s pamela i don t particularly recommend it fanny burney and maria edgeworth are both terrific and it occurs to me that i really should read vanity fair again it also occurs to me that no other writer has had quite such an influence on my book buying habits as heyer has had i m also thinking that finding the books was considerably more fun than putting them back will be posted by desperate reader at 10 50 pm 13 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels georgette heyer sunday august 18 2013 back in the garden the one thing that i don t like about my city centre flat is it s lack of a garden i adopted d s garden about five years ago which partly fills the gap but the time and energy to do much in it is limited to occasional weekends based around my work schedule this time it was only a couple of weeks between visits as opposed to the good 2 months since it had any real attention last time because between us we hadn t really had a weekend to spend at home together for that long 4 of those weekends were spent on holidays this isn t really a bid for sympathy i m a very amateur gardener and not much of a planner when our work hours coincided somewhat better it didn t matter to the garden so much there was plenty of time for fiddling around in it and for finding more plants it s much more tempting to spend money when you can enjoy the results and when there are still gaps for plants but over the last couple of years it hasn t worked out quite as neatly and i know d won t water properly we also cut down a tree which was getting out of control in one corner which has changed a shady dry corner into a really sunny one which retains water a little better all sorts of things that had been struggling under there unnoticed suddenly went crazy violets a particularly unappealing aquilegia something that might be a type of chamomile a small bush and a leafy green thing i can t remember the name of but is unbelievably persistent all refuse to be budged a really impressive rosemary has sadly decided to die in incremental stages that it has a blackberry growing through it that could likely only be shifted with dynamite which isn t at all practical probably doesn t help prodding things with a fork this weekend has made me aware of how much work i need to do and of how many plants a couple of hard winters have seen off at the moment i have a mass of overgrown things and roses with appalling blackspot along with any number of self seeded nuisances the garden needs time and a bit of money spent on it although i have spent a lot of time moving things around and potentially that ll look great next spring it also badly needs some late summer colour though anything in yellow through to red doesn t much appeal to me also there is a cat that s been sneaking in and crapping in the middle of the lawn i have never been a cat person and this sort of behavior hardly makes me warm to them the bright spot is that a white wisteria rescued from my windowsill 5 years ago has finally decided to flower i couldn t be more pleased also a pale yellow jasmine it should have been white labels lie has really come into it s own next to it the combination is quite pleasing and the scent of the jasmine almost strong enough to drown out the cat mess gardens can be expensive exhausting full of perils scratched arms muddy fingernails aching back and frustrating but they re magical when something glorious finally comes into its own posted by desperate reader at 10 21 pm 4 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels gardening saturday august 17 2013 regency buck georgette heyer my heyer odyssey continues i ve read 4 since monday and wish i d bought a 5th away with me this weekend it s about 4 years since i started blogging it s something which i think has basically been good for my reading habits i certainly read more and with more discipline which means i tackle books i probably wouldn t have bothered with before and make myself finish things i had a terrible habit of getting half way through a book and then abandoning it because i was distracted by another book another thing that s changed is that i don t often re read books i guess this is one of those downsides of growing up earning a living means i can buy a quantity of books but doesn t give me nearly as much time to read them back in my teens i owned a few hundred books a fairly even mix of georgette heyer jane austen dorothy sayers and terry pratchett which i read over and over favourite books were very familiar friends generally speaking i m too caught up in the excitement of discovering books which are new to me to spare much thought to what i might be missing by not re reading more but this week with heyer is making me consider it more regency buck is a heyer which i liked well enough back in the day and have certainly read a few times but not one which was a particular favourite reading it then i would have considered it mostly as a romance because that s how i m inclined to remember all of heyer s historical novels reading it over the last couple of days i m more inclined to think of it as more of a thriller albeit on with quite a lot of romance in it sadly i remembered the twist although that gave me plenty of opportunity to appreciate how heyer misdirects the reader something i m sure she enjoyed doing i think we know from the start that we are being misdirected but it s still done neatly for a romance she also spends a lot of time describing boxing matches racing and cock fighting the last in quite off putting detail i also noticed again how much trouble she takes over developing the character of her heroine yes she s rich attractive and spirited but heyer also gives her the temper tantrums and general bloody mindedness that are likely to characterise a girl just out of her teens it s a nice touch i m lending regency buck to d he says he might read it if he gets the time he sounded like he wanted to find the time i hope he does it ll be interesting to see what he thinks of it i suspect he ll enjoy it if he does read it posted by desperate reader at 10 22 pm 8 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels georgette heyer thursday august 15 2013 the convenient marriage georgette heyer having finally noticed that arrow books had re jacketed six georgette heyer titles i got mildly excited certainly excited enough to make a cheeky request for review copies and the charming lady at arrow was kind enough to oblige i ve said it many times before but i love georgette heyer her books have never failed me and i think she is in her way a writer of rare genius i do already have a complete set suppressed novels excluded of heyer s fiction the romances all being the pan editions from the mid 1980 s i am half minded to collect the slightly earlier pan paperbacks which i judge to come from the late 60 s early 70 s because they re gloriously camp which was partly why i felt cheeky asking for new copies but i really wanted to have a good look at these new copies i think the new cover designs are great and hope that they get rolled out to the rest of the series the last lot of jacket designs are inoffensive but convey none of the fun of a heyer book these new ones do the cover for the convenient marriage with it s rococo blue and gold and bold black silhouettes seems to me to reference both the 18th century setting and the original 1930 s publishing date as well as looking suitably contemporary in short it looks like a job well done another reason this selection attracted me is that with the exception of the grand sophy none of these titles were particular favorites when i was first reading them which makes it easier to approach them now without any particular prejudice settling down with the convenient marriage was a treat after reading a pile of m c beaton s regency romances i can appreciate all over again the quality of heyer s writing she might deal in cliche s and stereotypes her hero here is handsome in a tall dark smoldering way handy with a sword intelligent is conveniently wealthy and has a sense of humor like so many of the men i meet her heroine is small dark with heavy eyebrows a stammer a gambling habit and a no nonsense attitude it could all be rubbish but it isn t because heyer makes me laugh she also makes me feel safe and convinces me that all is well with the world i am a more sophisticated reader now than i was at 13 when i first discovered these books but the joy i get from them is just the same happy escapism posted by desperate reader at 10 36 pm 12 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels georgette heyer monday august 12 2013 the peacock spring rumer godden after a whole pile of trashy romances reading something where a happy ending wasn t the whole purpose of the book felt good this book doesn t have what you could really call a happy ending sorry if that s a spoiler but a for a book that s been around since 1975 i don t feel bad about giving away spoilers i think most of the rumer godden i ve read has been from earlier in her career and though there was nothing particularly specific to tie this one to the 1970 s it still felt very much like a book from the later part of the 20th century rather than the middle part curiously the plot is based on an incident from an earlier part of her life pre war godden had run a dance school in india where she had been unusual for accepting eurasian pupils amongst the students there were two english girls accompanied by a eurasian governess between whom godden sensed a certain amount of tension there seems to have been gossip about the girls wandering around the bazaar unaccompanied and eventually it transpired that the older girl had fallen pregnant after a relationship with one of her fathers servants this is basically the plot to the peacock spring una and hal gwithiam have been pulled out of school in england to live with their respictivley widowed and divorced father in delhi he s something quite grand in the united nations and although the girls and their father have always been close they sense that there s something not quite straight about this move when they arrive they find that the governess they ve been provided with is a stunningly beautiful eurasian women alix lamont about whom there are whispers and suspicions alix and una both fear and distrust each other una because she soon comes to understand what alix is about and alix because una is far more difficult to cope with than she had expected una at 15 is in the odd inbetween stage between child and woman old enough to see and understand more than she might like but still to young to understand the consequences of all her actions including her affair with the poet gardener ravi alix is seizing a chance for security with sir edward and has no intention of letting anything get in her way least of all a couple of schoolgirls but her ambitions and dissembling make her vulnerable alix is a difficult character she ought to be the villain of the piece but despite her behavior she isn t quite that role is reserved for sir edward it s edward who pulls his daughters out of a school where they re safe happy and where given a chance una could achieve her ambition of getting into oxford to drag them across the world to lend face to the fact that he s installed his mistress in the house as their governess a role she turns out to be basically under qualified to perform having got his way he s far to taken up with work and love to see what s actually happening in his house or to appreciate the effect his selfishness is likely to have on the lives of his daughters it is in the end edward who has the adult power in the family his uxoriousness which will cause him to misuse it altogether it s a remarkable portrait of the point in a family s development when the child begis to understand the fallibility of their parents begins to see the double standard between philosophy and actions and starts to judge accordingly i m really pleased this is back in print godden is to good to lose posted by desperate reader at 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