Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

I have read this book a few times in my own language, since a young girl. And I have just simply enjoyed it every time, it is actually my favroute Heyer book. Of course, I never did stumble upon the anti-semitisme, and I am sorry if I offend you with that. I have read more historical romances / books where a Jew or Jewish family are in the banking world / money lenders. For instance Bertrice Small books, and the Kira family. Have you read those?

THANK YOU. I heard so many good things about The Grand Sophy and not one reviewer mentioned the nasty bigotry in the book. It came as a great shock, which made it even worse.

I then read Heyer’s These Old Shades, which has some terrible classism, and no reviewers mentioned THAT either. (I wrote a review for LibraryThing and made sure to mention it.)

I don’t care how “beloved” Heyer is; I’ve given up on her books. She might be funny, but I can’t abide the blatant prejudice.

Excellent review. I agree entirely. I love many of Heyer’s books but this one is unreadable for all the reasons you give. To make it even worse the book was first published in 1950, i.e. after the second world war.

I have read more historical romances / books where a Jew or Jewish family are in the banking world / money lenders.

This isn’t the problem. It’s historically accurate to have a Jewish person working as a money lender, for various political and historical reasons that are also based in anti-Semitism.  The problem is that Heyer made the character an anti-Semitic stereotype.  The standard anti-Semitic trope of the Jewish moneylender is that he is a) greasy, b) dirty, c) has a large hooked nose, d) has small dark eyes, e) has dark curly hair, and f) wants to get his filthy hands on nice, clean, Christian girls.  This trope is so well known that you generally only need to put in a couple of identifiers and everybody knows what you’re talking about.  The Merchant of Venice and Ivanhoe (complete with the Jewish guy’s virtuous, beautiful daughter) for famous examples of this stereotype.

I loved The Grand Sophy when I was young so recently I put it on my Nook. Like you, I was somewhat disappointed. I still loved the dialogue and the way the plot is put together like a jigsaw puzzle. However, “the jew” did bother me. I also, at the end of the book, found myself wondering what it would be like to have to live with Sophy for a prolonged period of time. She is “high-spirited.” Yes, but managing and without a hint of insight. Kind of like the ladies I knew at church who were convinced that they could run your life better than you ever could without realizing that it was your life. If that makes sense. So, yes, I was a little disappointed with the re-read though there are still Heyers I enjoy.

looking 73 - goddess, I hope not.

I’m not even going to attempt a defence of the anti-Semitism in the book.  You’re right that it’s there and I completely get that for some readers that will overshadow any enjoyment they may have in the rest of the book.

But I do want to pick up on a couple of your other points.  There are non-arguing scenes with Charles and Sophy - the lovely scene where Amabel is sick is the obvious one, but there are others too and they clearly show how much these two really do like each other, when Charles lets himself.  Which meant that I didn’t think Charles’s turnabout was particularly abrupt.  It was clear that he’d been looking for a way to get out of his engagement for a while, and that Sophy was the reason.  Sunita’s right that Sophy’s character doesn’t develop a whole lot, but that didn’t worry me.  I like her so much as she is.

There is an interesting contemporary take on The Grand Sophy in Katie Fforde’s Flora’s Lot (no Jewish moneylenders, I promise!)

I confess, I found it easier to tolerate the anti-semitic stereotype in The Grand Sophy when I was under the impression it was one of her earlier efforts.  With a 1950 first publication date, it’s impossible to let it slide.

It is still, however, a good teaching tool for authors and readers wanting to know more about the Regency romance subgenre and the role Heyer played in creating it.

If you read in period, then you have to read with a period mindset. How do you feel about Dickens?

*sigh* Isn’t it the worse when you’re enjoying a book, and then out of nowhere you get the racism sucker punch? Thanks for the review, I was thinking of checking out some of the Heyer that’s on sale but I’d rather pay for books that don’t come with a dash of bigotry. Looking forward to reading the Venetia review, though.

*worst

@Anna—I’m fine with Dickens, Shakespeare, and Baroness Orczy, who wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel in 1903.  Each of them had anti-semitic stereotypes, and each could be judged as a product of its period. 

A novel written in 1950, that I have less tolerance for.  It was a different time than the early 20th C., and one would hope that the horrors of WWII would bring people to a new sensibility.

I need a really evil guy for the heroine to vanquish with her charm and some stuff concealed in her muff!

We know you didn’t mean that muff; only the hero gets vanquished by that muff.

I expected to find that this was one of her earlier books, but no, written in 1950, which makes the stero-type & anti-semetic slant tone offensive. I tend to lend a more tolerant ear to attitudes or verbage based on the time period they were written in, but post WWII surely we could expect a more modern take on racial or religious differences. Wasn’t the lesson about the horrors that can come from those prejudices still pretty fresh?

Gianisa wrote thusly:

he is a) greasy, b) dirty, c) has a large hooked nose, d) has small dark eyes, e) has dark curly hair, and f) wants to get his filthy hands on nice, clean, Christian girls.

Holy crap. Snape was a Jewish moneylender?

OK I love Georgette Heyer, I do. My absolutely favourite comfort read for all the witty dialogue and rakish heroes and confident heroines. Love her. Doesn’t mean I can stomach the casual anti-Semitism which I did pick up on even as a teenager but I thought it was published earlier and, just like Agatha Christie who is guilty of the same stereotypes, a product of the times in which she lived - not an excuse, a reason. The 1950 pub date does negate this but in all the 1930s (and earlier) Golden Era crime novels and school stories quite repulsive stereotypes against every race and country were commonplace.

So, Darlene, great minds think alike…..

It’s a book of its time. Heyer is also a snob - by our standards. But she created the Regency genre, and anyone who is interested in knowing where it all began, it’s all in Heyer.
A shame you marked it so low just because of Goldhanger’s bit, which doesn’t take up an awful lot of the book. You could just about skip that and read the rest.
I love “Sophy,” but I’ve known it most of my life, and I’ve learned to live with her idiosyncrasies. Since she died in the early 1970’s, her books are almost historic in their own right, and now the attitudes and assumptions have dated, too.
But I’m still a huge fan of her work.

I saw the grade and thought, are you fucking crazy?  In general I glaze over racism etc. in older books (and remember, this book is 61 years old, came out before GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT (the first major movie to tackle anti-semitism). 
Then again, I adore Heyer so much that I simply ignore the appalling classism (the adopted son in THESE OLD SHADES—horrors!) etc.  Either you adore Heyer or you don’t.
However, I am sorry that it was personally painful.  I do think 1950 was long enough in the past to overlook the casual racism.

There’s some in your face anti-Semitism in Dorothy L. Sayers, too.  I reread both Heyer and Dorothy L. every year or so and have to brace myself when I know the offending passages are approaching.  Can you imagine how Heyer and Sayers would have treated characters of color? 

Stereotypes are products of ignorance, and of the times, and let me disillusion people who think WWII magically changed the prejudices of hundreds of years.  Anti-Semitism was alive, well and institutionalized up until the 1960s when the civil rights movement made discrimination of most kinds not only uncool but illegal.

I still think Sayers and Heyer were brilliant writers and if either or both ladies were still with us and still writing, I have to think the social evolution of the past 60 years would be reflected in their novels.  I remind myself of that every time I pick up one of their books.

Ngaio Marsh wrote a book that astonished me with its casual racism. And it was published in 1968.
That sort of thing throws me out of a book, and I have to stop and remind myself that these people were raised in a different era, and actually didn’t think they were being offensive. Doesn’t stop me from being offended, but I still stop and remind myself.

@Jessica Thompson: Mary Roberts Rinehart, too, and the Nancy Drew books, although those were apparently sanitized in later re-issues. I’d like to think that Maya Angelou is right, that when we know better, we do better, but, honestly, it is such an uphill battle.

Since someone mentioned Snape, I’ll veer off topic and ask: Was anyone else bothered by the movie depiction of the goblins at Gringott’s? Perhaps it was the same as in the books and I just didn’t notice, but I was as uncomfortable with how the bankers were portrayed as I was Jar Jar Binks. I just don’t understand how either was OK.

I hate that scene as much as you, Sarah, and it always pulls me out of the story. The MPDGishness of Sophy though, I always thought was Heyer’s homage to Flora Poste, the heroine of COLD, COMFORT FARM. Her manipulating and managing her relatives while remaining virtually unchanged is part of the humor of the novel and Heyer even gave her hero the same name as the love interest in COLD COMFORT. Although, those who’ve read COLD COMFORT would know that Flora would never own a parrot or monkey as ‘nature mustn’t be allowed to make things untidy’.

Thank you for the honest review, Sarah.  I bought The Grand Sophy when it was on Kindle sale some months ago but hadn’t read it yet.  I probably won’t read it now, and I certainly won’t buy any more of Heyer’s books, not even on sale because I won’t support racism with my shekels.  The problem as I see it is that the affection for Heyer gives tacit approval for her attitudes and suggests that other authors of a more enlightened (??) time could choose to continue those stereotypes with the excuse, “Well, Heyer did it so it must be period appropriate.”  Eventually, someone has to call a halt to it.

poor24—there go poor 24 Heyer books I won’t buy (I already own 3 of the Regencies)

Thank you, Sarah. I read one of Heyer’s novels a few years ago and while the antisemitism in that one was not as glaring as the excerpts I’ve seen from The Grand Sophy, it was nevertheless very disturbing. I have not read another of her books since. I won’t rule out trying to read her again in the future, if only because of her influence on the genre - but I will probably be very careful in choosing what to read (and how much, if at all, to spend on it).

As others have noted, it is one thing to overlook/accept antisemitism as a product of the times in older books; however, for a novel published a mere five years after the end of WW2 to contain that kind of characterization is inexcusable. I don’t know who was editing Heyer at the time, or how much control she had over the editorial process, but surely someone should have realized that it was in extreme poor taste?

The persecution of the Jews in WWII did not effect a miraculous transformation in the way people thought. It took time, as these things always do. For instance, it wasn’t until after WWI that women were enfranchised in most countries of the world. And racial prejudice was alive and kicking - even more so in the US, but it was rampant in the UK, too.
My family on my mother’s side are Romany gypsies. Prejudice is still there now. It doesn’t die all at once. Think of the song from “South Pacific,” “You have to be carefully taught.” It’s education that’s the answer, and that takes time.
It’s difficult and brave to go against the general thinking of a time and the vast majority of people don’t do it.
It does seem ridiculous to condemn a wonderful author like Heyer for an attitude that was common at the time. It’s not as if she can go back and change it!
Dickens, Fielding, Shakespeare - refuse to have anything to do with them as well?

In her biography of Heyer, Jane Aiken Hodge stated that Heyer was descended from Russian Jews.  I often make disparaging remarks about the Irish—but I figure it’s ok.  After all, we’re the Irish, and if we can’t make fun of us. . .

When I read Sophy close to 40 years ago, I thought the Goldhanger scene was a riff on Shylock.  Of course, at the age of 13, I knew precisely two Jewish people, my dentist and my piano teacher.  Both lovely people, highly skilled in their fields.  So I guess the antisemitism sailed past my teenaged head.

But I will admit, I always thought Sophy was one of her early efforts, as well.

I don’t know who was editing Heyer at the time, or how much control she had over the editorial process, but surely someone should have realized that it was in extreme poor taste?

Sadly, a lot of things are only seen as ‘in poor taste’ if they are about the author, the editor, or someone they care about.  And in retrospect, of course.  It’s easy to see now.  But never underestimate the pig headed ignorance of the past.

Looking back on my childhood in the 70’s, I could never figure out why my father hated the show Banacek.  The hero was Polish.  We were Polish.  The mysteries were twisty and fun.  I loved it.

The whole premise of the show was “He’s a Pollack.  But he’s smart!”

And thanks for that, NBC.  I guess, in 1972, no one had explained to me what a backhanded compliment that was.

This is a really tough question.  I oppose taking offensive language or stereotypes out of books, because I think it whitewashes the author’s bias.

For instance, many people find Mark Twain’s works offensive and want to “sanitize” his works to comply with modern sensibilities.  However, some other people think characters like Jim were revolutionary for the time period. While I’m mixed on Jim, I think taking-out the n-word or other such nonsense merely puts a band-aid on racial prejudice. Racism in America is part of history and needs to be preserved in order to remind the horrors of the past and the need to strive towards a better tomorrow.  Books like Huckleberry Finn serve as a teaching moment, but it is routinely on the annual list of books people try to ban from libraries.

As far as the antisemitism, I think it is a bit of a cop-out to claim that Heyer was simply a product of her time.  Not everyone was anti-semitic in 1950, and sensitivity towards Jews and Judaism was more prevalent post WWII.  Therefore, we have to say that Heyer was antisemitic and not just blame it on the era in which she was raised.  We are all responsible for our actions and beliefs, whether or not they are widely accepted.

Basically, while I don’t agree with Heyer’s sentiment, it should be preserved, if only as a reminder to the prevalent antisemitism post WWII.  However, this doesn’t always make for an enjoyable book.

BTW, I am a librarian at a theology library, and we have many antisemitic and anti-Islamic texts in our extensive reformation collection.  We have copies of the Qur’an and the Masoretic Text with horrific opinions and interpretations.  We need to preserve this history as well as the foundations of protestantism.  But, I wouldn’t read any of these works for fun.

I like Heyer, but her novels are often a little mean-spirited, bigotry aside. Don’t get me wrong, they’re usually mean in a funny way, but there’s a lack of emotional generosity that keeps me from getting deeply involved with the characters.

@Anna Lawrence: Reading with the publication date in mind doesn’t work for me, given that it’s a mere five years after WWII and the Holocaust. Could there be a worse time to write something like that?

Sarah, I really hope this doesn’t put you off reading more of her   other books. I don’t personally like Venetia that much but Cotillion is an absolute joy.

I get uneasy when I am reading a book and bigoted name calling is used or the stereotype is described in detail to make sure you as the reader are clear on how awful said character is and represents their whole race/ethnic group.
Yes there are many authors out there that are misogynist, racist, or have questionable political views be it in their works or personally and we all have the choice if we want to read them or pass.  It is very easy to dismiss these views as “of the times” and I believe that is what a lot of us do. This way we can be comfortable with why we continue to read said authors.
Personally, when I read romance, I am not looking for racism, abuse, or hard core topics. There are other authors I can turn to for that.

Very helpful review! I’ve been debating whether to try a Heyer book and which to pick if I do. It won’t be this one! Bigotry is a bit of a pet peeve for me.

I am so annoyed with Sarah B. I live in L. A. anti-semitism is something I deal with often. Have you read The Help? Racism abound. What about the misogyny in so many romance novels, not mention date rape. The Grand Sophy is a wonderful book that should not be judged by a small incident with a very nasty man. My family left Europe in the 19th century and settled in London. Coin and gem dealers who were undoubtable a bit dodgy.
Georgette Heyer is an easy target, She’s dead.
I will continue to spend my shekels on her books along with Mr. William Shakespeare and Dorothy L. Sayers among others. Use you intellect!

I love Heyer. She WAS bigoted. She was class bigoted as well. And I confess that as a non-Jew I was not struck as harshly with Goldfinger; I thought it was inappropriate but it wasn’t a book killer for me. But I can see how it would be for others.

As for bigotry/racism not instantly going away and influences thereof, let me tell you of my grandmother. Born in 1894 (almost 30 years after the Civil War) in Henderson KY. Brought up as a wealthy shop owner’s daughter. Lost a love in WWI and ended up marrying a man over 20 years her senior. Didn’t know how to cook an egg when she first married and ended up an incredible cook. Smart, energetic, lovely woman. Traveled the world in later years, including moving to Korea for a year when in her 70s to teach English; just because she wanted to. Obviously quite well educated. An avid reader. Accomplished, worldly. I loved her like crazy.

She was convinced, all her life, of the indisputable fact (to her) that African Americans had smaller brains than white people and therefore must be taken care of and not trusted with highly technical jobs. It was what she was born into, it was how she was raised, and to think differently would not only be very uncomfortable for her, but an insult to her parents and family who also believed these things. Is it horrible that she thought that way? Of course. But to me it demonstrated the depth of inculcation that happens in families which forms our societal mores very early on and shapes our viewpoints forever. Some deeply rooted ideas take generations to yank out.

Was Heyer wrong? Of course she was. Was she also a product of her times and upbringing? Yep. And I still love her and am buying several books this week. I’ve not yet read Regency Buck OR Venetia!

@jody @darlynne I agree about Sayers who I also love. That upper class casual bigotry is really prevalent in so much 1920/1930 UK ficition whether it’s honest Cockneys/funny Chinese accents/Arab stereotypes. Painful BUT obviously part of society then just as so many 1960s/70s “comedy” shows are racist/sexist and I find that much more offensive as society should have evolved more then - and I 100% agree about the Gringot’s goblins, they make me very uncomfortable. But I still read and enjoy early 19th C books even whilst acknowledging the flaws.
A debate on Heyer sounds great by the way.

SB Sarah—I make tuffets for all my friends.  You want one?

products51—yeah, i probably have about 51 products in my art shows, including tuffets

just because I didn’t like it doesn’t mean I think less of anyone who thinks this book is awesome and isn’t as bothered by the scenes as I am.

And THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is why the Bitchery is my favorite blog.

You go on with your classy self, Sarah!

I love The Grand Sophy, and (but?) I love this review, too. I admire Sarah for being able to articulate what she liked and found good about a book that deeply offended her. The review made me think about why and how I am able to “overlook” or “read around” the Goldhanger scene. It’s partly because the anti-Semitism doesn’t touch me personally, but I also realized that I focus on Sophy and what the scene is meant to show about her so as not to think too hard about the weak, stereotyped characterization of Goldhanger.

Though I love Heyer’s books, but I do not think the comparisons to Shakespeare and Dickens are apt. Both Shylock and Fagin (or even Riah, a more sympathetic but lesser-known Dickens character) are characterized in deeply anti-Semitic ways, but they are also much more nuanced and human characters than Goldhanger (granted, they are major, not minor, characters. But they are not just caricatures).

So I don’t think the fact that anti-Semitism was still common in the 50s is an excuse for this weak characterization. And while it helps explain Heyer’s anti-Semitism, and to accept it in a way we would not (I hope) in our contemporaries, that doesn’t mean we should shrug off its appearance in her fiction as “just how things were back then.” When I teach 19th century literature, I don’t ignore the sexism, racism, colonialism, etc. in it. We talk about it. I can still love books with those elements, as I love Sophy. But I shouldn’t pretend they aren’t there, and that’s why I thank Sarah for this review.

Of course they’re real!  Duh!  ;-)

So, totally off topic but you started it—I live in Arizona and I frequent a little coffee shop where most of us sit outside even in the summer.  The metal chairs have small pads, but they aren’t big enough to cover all the metal.  I started making quilted pads out of left over fabric (I have lots) as protection against the hot metal in the summer and the cold metal—yikes!—in the winter.  Someone dubbed them “tuffets” and that’s what we’ve called them ever since.

develop62—no, I am not going to develop 62 new products

Heyer is also a snob - by our standards.

Lynne:  actually, no;  she wasn’t a snob.  The definition of that term is widely misunderstood.  A snob believes that social position actually equates with intrinsic worth (that is, that the rich or well-born are actually better human beings than the poor or humble), and Heyer demonstrably did NOT think that.  On the contrary, she makes a point of creating overtly ‘vulgar’ characters who are both more sensible and more morally estimable than their social ‘betters’.  Remember, too, that she was usually writing about a period when class dividing lines were even more impermeable than they were in the world of the 1920s-30s in which she had become an adult.

What is also very hard for younger people to understand now is how visible social class was in the past (and I am sure this applies to North America as well as Europe).  Even in the 1950s, one could look at the person standing next to one on the Underground, and fairly accurately ‘place’ them by their appearance and clothing, and most certainly if they spoke.  That is now impossible.  What Heyer was was what everyone of her generation (she was born in 1902) was, namely class-conscious.  She used class stereotypes for effect, just as she used crude national stereotypes (e.g. French, Highland Scottish, Spanish…), a literary device that was universal at the time she was writing.  This kind of thing grates on us now, even when it is not maliciously meant, but it is part of history.

Also she uses extreme exaggeration (compare P.G.Wodehouse, whom she sometimes resembles, especially in the set-piece scenes at the end of many of her books).  Sometimes we are dealing, not merely with comedy, but with roaring farce. 

This is a complex subject.  Of course the completely unthinking, vile anti-Semitism is hard for us to cope with, and I have no doubt it is even harder for those whom it touches personally than it is for the rest of us.  I should not be in the least surprised to learn that Heyer had middle-class Jewish friends, and made no connection whatever in her mind between them and the medieval stereotype of the evil Jewish moneylender.  But let us remember that (1) none of us is perfect and (2) every one of us is influenced by our own social background, undoubtedly to the extent of believing things that a future generation may find objectionable or completely ridiculous.

I think that, although the many changes of attitude of the last 50 years have been good, we need to think like historians when we read fiction that was written before the middle of the last century, and which is moreover set in an even earlier era. when social and cultural realities were very different from our own.  Historians and archaeologists are used to striving for this kind of mental detachment, but there is no reason why it should come easily to someone just reading a novel for pleasure.  In that case, it is probably safer to stick with recent books, written by authors from one’s own culture and generation.

I thought SB Sarah’s review was fair, given her understandable personal reactions, but to my mind, Sophy, though undoubtedly bossy, is fundamentally a kind young woman.  She wants people, even the maddening Eugenia and Lord Bromford, to be happy.  Does that count for nothing?

@Kim

As far as the antisemitism, I think it is a bit of a cop-out to claim that Heyer was simply a product of her time.  Not everyone was anti-semitic in 1950, and sensitivity towards Jews and Judaism was more prevalent post WWII.  Therefore, we have to say that Heyer was antisemitic and not just blame it on the era in which she was raised.  We are all responsible for our actions and beliefs, whether or not they are widely accepted.

Well put.

Some comments here surprised the heck out of me. Using that ‘product of an era’ defence is an insult to people who didn’t share Heyer’s views during her time. Just because one could write well doesn’t mean one’s prejudices can be excused with ease. 

knew66 - I knew 66 flake ice cream and I liked it.

?? ??? ??????!

That said, anti-semitism in a book like this takes me out of the story, as SB Sarah says, but (especially in an older book) doesn’t bother me, because as many have said, it’s a product of (mis)education.

It makes me roll my eyes, and sigh, and from a writing skill perspective I like SB Sarah get a big underwhelm that the author took an easy way out (like when very White novels have a big black illiterate Huge Scary Black Man threaten the Virginal Heroine). But it doesn’t offend me unless it’s written in the last 20 years or so.

Because frankly, anti-semitisim or racism published since the 80s? That’s chutzpa.

Yes, tuffets are puffy, upholstered footstools with legs that can also be used as a very low seat.  If it’s bigger it is generally called a hassock.  Tuffets could be tucked away under the cloths covering tables in Victorian parlors.  Later they became quite fanciful with a button on top, sometimes a skirt, a luxurious fabric.  “Little Miss Muffet” sat on one though she is often illustrated as sitting on a small hillock which is the alternative meaning of “tuffet” (since the short upholstered stools resembled, vaguely, small grassy hillocks).

I was always puzzled about the hill versus puffy, stool illustrations of the nursery rhyme so I looked the term up.

On the subject of Dickens, does anybody else find Fagin sort of lovable?

What Maili said.

Note: acknowledging that an author is or was racist or sexist or otherwise bigoted doesn’t mean you have to stop reading or enjoying their works. Talent and niceness or enlightenment don’t go hand in hand—Lovecraft is my go-to example here, but Margaret Mitchell also comes to mind.

With living authors, it’s a little harder for me, because continuing to read their stuff means (at least a little bit) giving them money. Heyer/Lovecraft/Mitchell don’t present that problem, at least.

@Maddie That’s what I mean by saying Fagin is more than a stereotype, though he is that too. The final scene where he is alone in his cell, well, I wouldn’t say I find him lovable or even sympathetic, exactly, but he’s at least pitiable. Goldhanger is a caricature meant for comic effect, not in the least human.

And @AgTigress, thanks for fixing the italics. Could not get it to work.

Thanks for the linkage, Sarah! Much appreciated. And I completely agree that the problem in TGS *as a book* is the lazy way Goldhanger is depicted. For an author of her ability, who has demonstrated repeatedly that she can create a nuanced minor character in a paragraph, to use a stereotype to do the cognitive and emotional work for her is an authorial choice that *should* be called out.

I think that, although the many changes of attitude of the last 50 years have been good, we need to think like historians when we read fiction that was written before the middle of the last century, and which is moreover set in an even earlier era. when social and cultural realities were very different from our own.  Historians and archaeologists are used to striving for this kind of mental detachment, but there is no reason why it should come easily to someone just reading a novel for pleasure.  In that case, it is probably safer to stick with recent books, written by authors from one’s own culture and generation.

I have ph.d. training in historical methods. I engage in (externally and internally funded) primary historical research and analysis at a major research university, among other types of analysis and writing. I am demonstrably able to “think like a historian” and practice “mental detachment,” if peer review is anything to go by. I’ve also been reading and rereading Heyer since before she died, and I’m comfortable with how I interpret her work (an interpretation which has undergone reconsideration and revision over the years). I stand by my post and I appreciate Sarah’s thoughtful review.

Off Topic but…....... What the holy hell is wrong with her arm in this picture?  It looks like a wrinkled, discolored 80 y/o womans flabby arm.

@Agtigress - I’d argue that Heyer was a snob. She certainly was in relation to other authors. She never joined the RNA because she thought we were beneath her. And she did believe that class was somehow inborn, that it was difficult to transcend class. Take Belinda in “The Quiet Gentleman” who has pretensions of grandeur and ends up with a farmer. Not good enough for the hero. And the heroine of “Devils Cub” has a General for a grandfather, so that’s okay. Her slutty sister obviously takes after her mother’s side (that’s emphasized even in looks). When a character turns out to be okay, they’re either “salt of the earth” or they turn out to have a General or a bishop for a grandfather, which made them socially acceptable and explained their refined attitude.
Rest of your comments - perceptive, insightful, and I totally agree.

Opps, never mind, I just saved it to my desktop and zoomed in.  It’s a glove that goes way up.  It just looked nasty from this distance.

@Kristina—

Her arm is in a glove.

Hmmm… while I can understand and sympathize with a reviewer’s hot-button topics and while I hold no truck whatsoever with antisemitism I can’t see giving this book a D grade.  Just can’t.  I guess I’m of the opinion that if a book is full of witty, sparkly dialogue and characters and well-written and entertaining to the extreme it rates a little higher than a D especially when that scene was hardly more than a few pages. Like others have mentioned already I give most authors who wrote prior to the Civil Rights Movement a bit of a break when I encounter this type of stupidity.  I have to say Heyer’s books are a reliable source of wit and excellence when my other reads aren’t cutting the muster.  I’m sorry it ruined for you what I think is a fantastic book by a fantastic author.

Funny.  I should have said “cut the mustard”.  Here I have been all along thinking “cut the muster” was the proper phrase and I was wrong.

And she did believe that class was somehow inborn, that it was difficult to transcend class.

Yes, indeed she did, as did many people of her generation, when social mobility was much more difficult to achieve than it is now.  There was a widespread belief that not just different races, but different classes of people within the same race were rather like different breeds of livestock—adapted for different purposes.  The most grotesque examples in Heyer are early, notably in These Old Shades.  But this is what I refer to as class-consciousness,  which was pretty well universal while social classes were sharply divided and very obvious.  I don’t think it is the same thing as snobbery, where class is directly equated with levels of worth as human beings.  Class-consciousness is the equivalent of saying that a Shire horse and a Thoroughbred are suited to different roles and functions in life:  snobbery would be saying that all Thoroughbreds are in every way better horses than Shires in all contexts.  In fact, the vogue for the development of ‘improved’ breeds of domestic animals by selective breeding from the late 18th century and right into the 20th had a direct effect on both scientific and popular thinking about human breeding.  Some of that thinking took paths from which we now recoil, not because they are necessarily unscientific, but because we can now see, from the bitter lessons of history, how they can be exploited for evil ends.

Humans are nothing like as pure-bred as modern pedigree livestock, of course, but in the past, there was far, far less human breeding across class lines than there is now, and much more systematic inbreeding both at the highest and lowest social levels, so the concept of these different ‘types’ was not as ludicrous as it may seem to us. 

I addressed this issue in more detail in my paper to the Heyer conference in Cambridge a couple of years ago, and don’t really feel like going through it all again.  Perhaps I ought to have published the damn thing, after all.

I know Heyer was very twitchy about her relationships with other writers, but I suspect that this was nothing as simple as thinking she was better than them.  In fact, she rather despised her own romantic comedies, and wanted to write more ‘serious’ novels, but she had to make a living.  We shall learn more when the new biography appears!

On a point made by others:  I do not believe that Heyer’s unpleasant caricature of Goldhanger necessarily means that she was anti-Semitic in real life.  She may have been, but that passage does not prove it.  It proves only that she disapproved of dishonest moneylenders, and in the period in which her story was set, moneylenders, honest or otherwise, usually were Jewish.  The point of the incident is really only to set up a villain against whom Sophy can display her intrepid courage and commonsense.  Of course Heyer should have picked a different kind of villain.

Heyer would not necessarily have made any connection at all between a character like that and any Jewish people she might have known.  Most of us are capable of this kind of mental compartmentalisation.  In fact, like the Red Queen in Alice, all of us are capable of believing a half-a-dozen mutually contradictory things before breakfast.  Even very intelligent people do not always think logically.

Sophy is like Austen’s Emma without Emma’s comeuppances. Mildly amusing and entertaining, but nothing that sticks with you once you’re done.

I was going to throw a fit over giving Heyer a D ... then I read the critique of, and remembered, the “Jew” character and thought, “F#ck it. Flunk her.”

She’s a great writer and all, but the antisemitism blew goats.

I misread the cover as: ‘Effervescent!’ - Keanu Reeves.
Huh?

The Grand Sophy is definitely not the only instance of Heyer’s bigotry. I’ve read several of her mysteries, and they include at least 2 instances of extrme bigotry toward the Polish and one anti-gay.

I enjoy her writing (as I enjoy Agatha Christie), but there are some bad elements.

@jody - Remember that line in Gaudy Night where the porter of the college, who’s portrayed as a generally kind but crusty character, says “What this country needs is a Hitler?” This was my face when I read that for the first time: o_O. Then I had to flip to the copyright page to verify that yes, Gaudy Night was written *before* World War II, when, presumably, a crusty porter at a women’s college might think that Hitler was… an OK guy?

It still freaks me out every time I read it.

Yes, but the heir to the throne also thought Hitler was a swell guy, so that particular line is indicative of real people during that time and in that place. Every time I see anything now about the Duchess of Windsor and her elegance or her fashion or jewelry collections, I cringe because they were overt Nazi supporters and it boggles the mind that people aren’t aware of that in the 21st century. Yet you’ll still see references to the glamorous Duchess of Windsor in fashion magazines. Amazing.

There’s the more usual stereotypical Jewish bigotry in Gaudy Night, too, during the scenes about Lord Peter’s nephew and his debts.

I understand all the differing reactions to the antisemitism—those who can flinch and just try to ignore it, and those for whom it ruins the book.  But I’m very intrigued by the opposition to Sophy.  I love Sophy!  She just goes out and seizes life and makes it do exactly what she thinks it should, but all with a good heart.

Heyer’s classism is so strong.  Of course you would not ever, really, want to live with one of those heroes who was always looking at people through his quizzing glass as if he was better than they were.  The ones who were so “devilish high in the instep”.  But somehow she makes it fun to read about, at least to me.  Avon without his profound sense of his own superiority to everyone around him…can you imagine?  There’s no character left.

You know, I’ve read god only knows how many hundreds (nay, thousands) of comments over the years from readers who won’t suffer infidelity, rape, forced seduction, heroes with moustaches, short heroines, plump heroines, zombies, vampires, alphahole (TM Karina Bliss) heroes, long separations, etc. etc. etc.—that for however many readers, those elements will make a book unromantic and therefore a failure. I’ve read impassioned debates about whether a happy-for-now ending satisfies the requirements for genre Romance, and whether not wanting to read protagonists of color says anything about a reader’s own views on race.

It seems to me that given the range of things readers complain about (largely unchallenged, IMO) a completely un-nuanced, unquestioned and unquestioning, downright ugly racial and religious stereotype of a character should be sufficient to find a book extremely problematic.

As for the question of whether that, in turn, condemns Heyer, I don’t think her anti-Semitism was much of a secret. Still, I don’t know if we can or should so easily conflate a book and its author. How many books do any of us perceive issues relating to race, gender, sexuality, religion, etc. that we find problematic, even though the author might declare up one side and down the other that she’s not biased or bigoted? Certainly an author’s views can leak into their work, but sometimes an author can set out to portray a character one way, and have it read another way entirely.

In Heyer’s case, it seems to be much more the former, which seems even MORE reason NOT to defend Heyer as a way to defend her book (and vice versa), but still, I think readers should always feel free to critique a book without being told they’re silly or unfair, or holding a grudge too far past 50 years or whatever, especially when it comes to such an unambiguously ugly portrayal of racial and religious identity.

What Robin said.

I have little patience for the product of their time BS anyway. I come from a family with a very WASP branch holding social positions and political power. So when one of the daughter decided to marry a Jewish Russian do you know what happened?

Nothing. She did. They joined the society pages and kept going about their lives. It was in the 1920’s and the world kept turning. Everyone still got elected. There is a casual racism and privilege in excusing blatant racism as historically accurate. There are many fine books we have either edited or no longer read for pleasure due to racism. Even the ‘unedited’ versions of Disney films are edited.

Excusing is endorsing. Read Heyer all you want but call racism out wherever you see it or it’s ugly tendrils just grip us all tighter.

Never read any Heyer, never will.

Re Mr. Goldhanger - Huh. I wondered how I could have missed the antisemitism back when I was a Heyer addict, so I dug out my ancient copy of Sophy (printed, well, it doesn’t say when it was printed, but it must have been in the early seventies; it cost all of 75 cents).

Heyer was cleaned up for that edition.

My copy just says “His instinct made him prefer…the utmost urbanity…” And then, I hadn’t read Oliver Twist in those days and didn’t recognize Goldhanger as a Fagin knockoff. I wonder what else may have been tidied up back in the day, and I wonder if Heyer approved it (she was still alive and publishing new books at the time - I have a none-too-successful late Heyer that tried to acknowledge feminist ideas, so it must have been written in the mid-seventies or thereabouts).

Capcha - received83 - no, by 1983 I was no longer receiving Heyers.

BTW - I’m the Sharon with the ancient edition of The Grand Sophy - the Sharon earlier in the discussion is somebody else. Wow, two Sharons in one place.

Ironically, the thing I always think of with regard to racism, anti-semitism, etc. in books I enjoy (and that includes some Heyer, and a lot of British “Golden Age” mystery) is from Dorothy Sayers, herself hardly an unproblematic figure.  I recall reading somewhere that Sayers said about C.S. Lewis something like that it was difficult to believe that such an utterly charming and erudite gentleman could be so viciously and glaringly misogynist, but that one simply had to acknowledge that it was a part of his otherwise worthwhile personality, and accept the good parts without condoning or absorbing the sexism and misogyny.  (She put it more elegantly, but I don’t have the quote at hand.)  I don’t remember if she was discussing Lewis’ work or the man personally, but in either case it struck me as a very sensitive comment.  I personally love Sayers precisely for her exceptionally nuanced views about sexism, and have huge problems with her views on race and class.  When I hit a scene that I find painful in a novel I otherwise love, I take a deep breath and remember her words, and that good and bad are mixed in people as in literature.

That said, while I didn’t find The Grand Sophy painful to read, it isn’t one of my favorite Heyers.  (That distinction goes to Venetia.  Can’t wait for the review.)  While I like Sophy as a person, I just wasn’t very convinced by the romance.  I can see her and Charles becoming very good friends, because they both have fundamentally similar personalities: they’re both caretakers, who feel tremendous responsibility (and occasional impatience) toward the people around them.  They’re allies, and they both enjoy the sensation of being able to spar without pulling punches for fear of hurting the feelings of one of the people they’ve taken responsibility for (neither will “engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed person”).  But I don’t see them as lovers.  I could more plausibly imagine each of them marrying someone weaker who needed to be taken care of, and remaining rather in the relationship that Shaw describes between Eliza and Higgins in the afterword of Pygmalion; they fight a lot, and enjoy their fighting, and enjoy being married to other people.

I could go on for a while about the effect of authors’ prejudices on characterization in general, and about anti-semitism in romances in particular, but I’ve used up more than two cents already I think, and the computer won’t let me “cross my lines” to keep postage low. ;)

Remember that line in Gaudy Night where the porter of the college, who’s portrayed as a generally kind but crusty character, says “What this country needs is a Hitler?”

Yep, Kit—and then there’s the part where Peter’s nephew gets into debt, and Peter bails him out with strict instructions about “not going to the Jews again.”

I cringe every time I read it—but Gaudy Night is still one of my all time favorite books.  I’m not going to let my 21st century sensibilities get in the way of enjoying a really well-written and well plotted book containing characters I love.
It’s cheap and easy to condemn from sixty, or seventy years away.  In other words, why did it take someone fifty years to write a story like The Help?

Right, wrong or indifferent, everyone is a product of their times.  It’s not right, but it’s so.

I enjoyed most of GS as a story, but the lady herself would have been a royal pain in the rear.  Anybody who’ll bring a parrot and a monkey into a household full of young kids is either totally oblivious to the care these critters would need or an inconsiderate twit.  It’s amusing to read about her, but your evaluation is dead-on—she doesn’t learn or grow, she just manipulates.  What the book needed was at least a passing moment or two when Sophie realized that her own feelings for Charles were a little more than a cousinly impulse to keep him out of a horrible marriage, and we only ever got to see Sophy doing her set pieces.  I feel almost as sorry for Charles facing marriage with Her Grandness as with Eugenia.  I wouldn’t want to live with someone so erratic—and I suspect she would be the same kind of parent as her own father.

I thought Goldmember was just an exaggeration of the less-ethical sort of moneylender, just as the villain in The Foundling was an exaggeration.  Some of Heyer’s villains were total lampoons.  So were some of her heroes—the Regency Buck deserved a swift kick to his succession.

Bigotry from only slightly earlier times… I know that 1950 seems to be a date when the dangerous stupidity of anti-Semitism should have been obvious, but Heyer’s opinions were formed long before 1950 and she wasn’t just stereotyping Jews.  Her homophobic portrayal of a character in Reluctant Widow was just as bad and just as blatant.  I don’t think many of Heyer’s villains were more than two-dimensional, nor were a lot of her secondary characters.  If her crooked Jewish moneylender had been the sole trowel-it-on-thick baddie, fair enough—but he wasn’t.  Look at the Evil Stepmother in Charity Girl, or the narcissistic sister-in-law in Sylvester, the batty uncle in Cotillion, the terminally stupid Belinda who might as well have been a villain for all the trouble she caused ...  For me, Heyer Regencies are great popcorn books, not to be taken too seriously. 

My own walk-away-from-this-writer was Ngaio Marsh - I’d read her name as a ‘classic’ mystery name and took half a dozen titles out of the library one summer—and by the time I’d got through four of them, it was obvious that her lesbians were all either deranged (per the medical thinking of the era) and dangerous or beautiful, brainless, victims of seduction.  The stories weren’t so much whodunnits as games of ‘spot the demon dyke.’  And that got boring.

At the risk of being labeled a heretic, I’d rather read Heyer at her worst—and some of her stuff was fairly awful—than have to face Kathleen Woodiwiss’ books.  I know she put sex into romance, but such sex—the purple prose and adjective-adjective-noun patterns, and romanticizing rapists…?  Maybe I’d have fond memories if I’d read her in my teens, but that’s just what put me off the genre back in the 70’s.  I truly don’t see why so many readers idolize her.

Heyer had wit, and marvelous dialogue, and humor.  Like Sayers, I can enjoy her for that while wishing that she’d been a more enlightened member of her generation.

I agree that it’s anti-semetic and the scene would be weak even if it weren’t.  I don’t think that’s OK for any reason.  It is a really big deal WTF problem for me, but I still love the book.  It’s a really good book.  It is a difficult thing to reconcile, this love of some aspects and abhorrence of others, but I think worth doing.
While we’re talking about horrible Jewish stereotypes in literature that’s still worth reading, off the top of my head I’ll add Balzac, Eden, Sue (I’m not really sure Sue is worth reading but it may just be ghastly translations?), Trollope, and Joyce to Scott (though I don’t actually like him) Lovecraft, Mitchell (don’t really like her either), Dickens (another I’d say you could give a miss), Fielding, Shakespeare et al.  Hell, D’Israeli is as bad as anyone.  Basically, if there is a Jewish character in an old novel, it’s going to be hard to read.  Life is hard.  At least literature is sometimes rewarding.
I hold art to a different standard than the artists themselves.  Bad people still make great art.  I don’t know much about Heyer as a person, nor do I wish to.  I always hate learning about my favorite artists as people.  If she were still alive, and money I gave her by purchasing her books were going to potentially make its way to, say, the nazi party, I think it would be a different moral issue, but as it stands, I don’t see a problem buying her books.  I’m not calling her a nazi, just to be clear.
Sophy is fabulous, and if she doesn’t get a comeuppance like Emma, or generally grow as a character, it’s because she shouldn’t.  Her attempts to organize the world are well-intentioned and apt whereas I find Emma’s behavior selfish and ill-advised, if not down-right stupid, which Sophy never is.  I don’t think Sophy should be punished or softened or improved in the end.  And she and Charles have such intense sexual chemistry, it seems to me they’ll spend their lives very happily ever after indeed.

As an aside, I never thought Shakespeare was being anti-Semetic with Shylock in THE MERCHANT OF VENICE.  Yes, Shylock does become vengeful and wants Antonio dead—but only after both his daughter and money are stolen from him (and even that’s after he is looked down on by the other characters through the whole play).  Plus he’s so obsessed with vengeance that he turns down a payment that’s far greater than what he is owed—hardly the stereotypical “greedy Jew.”  I think you have to give Shakespeare credit for being well ahead of his time when it came to creating a Jewish character.

Older fiction (whatever the genre) tends to have issues that push particular buttons- whether it is racism, sexism or any other variant.  I would generally not be surprised if a book published before 1960 has elements of anti-semitism.  I have read too much “golden age” 1950’s sci-fi to be surprised by that stereotype.  The real changes came in the 60’s and 70’s- probaby because there was also a new generation of editors, as well as writers.
It’s a characterisation shortcut, in the same way that many many authors now will use a character being racist/sexist/anti-semitic/homophobic as an easy shortcut to show haw bad they are.
No-one in GS seems to grow, or learn anything- least of all the main character.  I do enjoy Heyer, but I think sometimes I prefer Mary Balogh’s riffs on similar plotlines.

On a totally different note, but related- persephone books publishes neglected 20th century authors, particulrly women. They published Miss Pettigrew lives for a day and Miss Buncle’s Book which both provide a much more nuanced picture of the middle class in the 1930s.  Miss Buncles book (and the sequel Miss Buncle married- haven’t gotten hold of the oop third novel yet) is a particular favorite and has a much more integrated view of the world.  Classism is still present, but it was very much part of the world- but a sympathetic view of a lesbian couple ( one of my buttons, rather than jewish stereotypes).  DE Stevenson was as prolific as heyer, and as well loved, but hard to find now. Persephone don’t do e-books but you can do mail order from their web site. (I am in no way affiliated with them, just a fan of the publishing philosophy)

I recently read this book for the first time having loved other Heyer titles (Frederica is my fav’) and when I got to the end found I didn’t like it.

I didn’t like Sophy at the end.  I enjoyed some of her antics but at the end of the book when she lies to organise the final showdown/scene.  It left a bad taste in my mouth.  Anyone who will lie to someone they supposedly love to get their own way - doesn’t really love them.

And the fact that Charles is her cousin, not a distant one but an immediate relation kind of creeped me out too.

It’s really horrendous to stumble into a bigot, sexist or homophobic scene when in the middle of a great read.  It’s like eating a delicious salad from your own garden and happening upon a slug who came along for the ride. 

Don’t ask me how I know this.

Two of the more notable examples that I’ve come across lately - L.M. Montgomery’s short stories, where she is very bigoted towards “the Jews,” and, alas, Betty MacDonald’s “The Egg and I” where she spends an entire chapter dissing First Nations/Native Americans.  Fortunately, I read “The Plague and I” first, where Ms. MacDonald had great relationships with African-American and Japanese fellow patients, so obviously she was not just a casual bigot. 

Also troublesome to me is reading nostalgic romances, like Grace Livingston Hill or Kathleen Norris and encountering African-Americans who just LOOOOVE serving Caucasians, or characters with such names as “Mock Suey.”  (cringe!)  Actually, GLH was quite progressive for her time, especially as she got older, especially around issues of sexism and classism, but those earlier works still make me uncomfortable.

@Lee Rowan:  When I suggested a couple of years ago on Sarah Monette’s livejournal that Francis Cheviot, she expressed some doubt, so apparently it’s not obvious to everybody.  (And for those who don’t know, Sarah Monette wrote a whole series featuring a gay wizard.)

@AgTigress:  Do you really think people today can’t place other people by class?  I would bet most reasonably observant adults can, with at least a 70-80% accuracy rate.

To all the people who think anti-semitism was generally dead by 1950:  I agree with Lynne Connelly and the person who pointed out that Gentleman’s Agreement came later.  There were restricted country clubs and restrictive covenants that applied to Jews as well as African-Americans and Asians into the 1960’s.  And we’re all kidding ourselves if we think racism is dead today.  That doesn’t mean it isn’t good to call it as you see it, but we ought to be careful about being complacent.

Those of you here who think Sayers was anti-Semitic have not read her very carefully!  She has a number of totally sympathetic Jewish characters from different walks of life, and well as occasional observations, usually from Peter, expressing admiration for traits that are specifically, if stereotypically, ascribed to Jews, including high intelligence and respect for family life.  ‘Going to the Jews’ was a standard idiom, not an expression of personal opinion: like ‘welching on a debt’.  The latter does not necessarily imply that the speaker despises Welsh people, and it is still used in these politically-correct times (maybe the spelling lulls people into thinking it is not racist, but it is).

Hurray for those who have repeated my point that exaggeration, sometimes to extreme degrees, is part of Heyer’s bag of tricks, as it still is for so many comic writers. 

Those who have mentioned Ngaio Marsh, another of my favourites:  I think she really was a snob, with an exaggerated regard for the well-born, but there are other complex issues that feed into her attitudes, above all the fact that she was a ‘Colonial’, and therefore inclined to be more British than the Brits.  She was a brilliant writer, though.

@ Lee Rowan: I’d rather read Heyer than Woodiwiss any day, myself. Woodiwiss’s writing is inferior to Heyer’s, and her plots are either nonsensical (I still can’t believe Ashes in the Wind) or unbalanced (see The Flame and the Flower, where everything happens in the beginning and end, but nothing happens in the middle). Then there’s the misogyny, as well as the romanticization of both rape and slavery…in the 1970s, no less. I won’t make excuses for Heyer’s bigotry, but at least I’ve read books by her that didn’t offend me and were fun to read.(Frederica is my favorite.)

AgTigress, I rarely disagree with you.
This, however, is one of the exceptions.

I love Sayers. However, to lift a quote from ‘Busman’s Honeymoon’, Peter said “But then he’s a Jew, and knows exactly what he’s doing.” [With money.]
To me, that suggests the stereotypical view that people of the Jewish persuasion were well used to dealing with money and indeed had a flair for handling money.

Ngaio Marsh wrote ‘A Clutch of Constables’. In that book, the heroine encounters a man who was born in England, of an English mother and an Ethiopian father. He’d lived all his life in England and spoke only English, but still the heroine asked him if he’d ever thought of going back to “his own country.”

I love some of the books she’s written, such as ‘Light Thickens’. Usually, Marsh is wonderful with Shakespeare. I’m kind of glad I’ve never read anything she’s written re: Othello.

I hope (because I hope that views of and conditions for women will be better then than they are now) that in 60 years many of the books given good reviews on this site will be considered misogynist and sexist.  I also hope that in those 60 years’ time the celebration on this site of romance novels, whether historical and contemporary or from the 1979s or today, will be given a big WTF?, because the token references here to sexism and worse aren’t really enough to deal with the serious issues the majority of these books raise.

That doesn’t mean I don’t like this site and don’t read romance.  I just read both with critical faculties intact, and choose the books I read carefully, basing that choice on avoiding the issues which most squick me personally (for instance, lying for personal advantage is a big no-no for me) as well as on the tropes which I most like.  There are very few writers all of whose books I like, but I can like the books I do without the thought of the books I don’t getting in the way.

I learnt a long time ago that it is very difficult for most people (including me) to even recognise the societal norms in which they grow up, let alone to step outside them and come to opposite views.  Even those of us who think that we are now enlightened and right thinking are almost certain to find out in future years and decades that we are not, and that we need to develop and change our views.  That we are even in a position to recognise that fact is due to the advantages of the society in which we live, the education with which we have been gifted and the information which is made available to us.  I dislike condemnation of people who haven’t had those advantages, when there are so many of us who do have those advantages and still fall into the same traps.

I feel you! As a South Asian Muslim, I have also had that awful experience of settling down with a lovely book, everything’s going nicely, when suddenly I turn the page and get sucker punched by an ignorant or hateful throwaway comment. Don’t get me started on the Sheikhs! UGH!!!

I do like Georgette Heyer, and I like The Grand Sophy - but it is horribly let down by the Jewish moneylender. Firstly because it’s racist and bigoted, but also because it lets Heyer down as a writer as well. It’s like, “really Georgette? Is that the best you can do??”

If you decide to try Heyer again, which I hope you do as I love your reviews, can I recommend Faro’s Daughter? It is my favourite, because Deb is not just feisty or whatever, she is a wonderfully self-sufficient character, and she isn’t a lady or part of the gentry or anything, her father runs a gaming house. Good fun.

I always felt a bit uncomfortable with the “instinct of his race” line, but, like so many books from less enlightened times with passing bigotry, I move on. When I think of The Grand Sophy, I think of the hilarious characters and the brilliance of Augustus Fawnhope, who consistently cracks me up. Though, I admit, I always thought the first cousin thing was creepy. She should have made them second cousins, at least.
There are just so many authors who cause this dilemma, but ultimately, I like to try and take a balanced approach. Hence, I can forgive and enjoy Heyer, Enid Blyton, CS Lews (but I want to slap Susan) and so many others, especially those I have loved since childhood, because ultimately the enjoyment I got outweighed the few moments of ick.
I’ve always had trouble reconciling really horrible people who make something that I love. Wagner was a nasty, nasty dude, but I love his music. Walt Disney was not a great human being, from all I’ve heard, but Fantasia changed my life. It may seem silly, but for me, I always felt that perhaps it was a cosmic balance thing; their souls pouring into something beauty to atone for the crappiness in their hearts.
I can understand people might want to forswear Georgette Heyer, it’s your call, but man, I can’t help but feel my life is just that much better for having read Cotillion, Arabella, Frederica and Friday’s Child. Cotillion is hilarious and Freddy is my favourite Heyer hero, Arabella is adorable, Frederica is just wonderful with gorgeous characters, especially Felix and Friday’s Child is kind of genius, especially Ferdy’s dark allusions to the machinations of a mysterious character whose name can be obtained upon application to the Honourable Marmaduke Fakenham.

PS the Capcha tells me already62, and that, the day after my 32nd birthday, is somewhat alarming.

I feel you! As a South Asian Muslim, I have also had that awful experience of settling down with a lovely book, everything’s going nicely, when suddenly I turn the page and get sucker punched by an ignorant or hateful throwaway comment. Don’t get me started on the Sheikhs! UGH!!!

@Ziggy:  Ugh.  I avoid Sheikhs like the plague.  I am married to a South Asian Muslim and converted to Islam myself a few years ago.  I put a comment on another thread about my excitement over Nowhere Near Respectable by Mary Jo Putney where the heroine is Indian/British (grew-up in India)...in a Regency.  I was enjoying the book, but then she has this ability of “perfect scent.”  It is referred to as her “bloodhound nose.”  It made me cringe every time it was mentioned.  While I don’t think the intention at all was to dehumanize her, it bothered me that the first time I’ve encountered a South Asian regency heroine and she has a dog-like sense of smell.  I just thought it was interesting that when we see a heroine that already faces prejudice from some small minded characters, that she has this ability that is generally not associated with humans.

It ruined the book for me, especially since her ability was the crux of the novel.

I think it’s a bit unfair to label Heyer as an anti-semite. As far as I know, she didn’t join the Blackshirts, sympathise with Moseley or campaign against the Jews.
BTW, when she refers to “the Jews” as a moneylending class, that’s as much a product of the Regency, as the sources she took her research from used that terminology to describe them, whether the moneylender was Jewish or not.
I’d have said she was anti-Goldhanger and guilty of casual, careless thinking when it came to creating a secondary character. She isn’t to be absolved from that, but to call her anti-Semitic is probably going a bit too far.

It’s a problem a lot of writers today have to contend with. If I create a villain who, for instance, happens to be gay, will I be perceived as anti gay, or will I have to balance it with a “good” gay character?

I dunno. I love Georgette Heyer, and I love The Grand Sophy (which has one of the best proposal lines ever, for my money). I can’t say I love the racial/class stereotyping she uses, but I think I mentally adjust my expectations for old books. I would think very badly of a contemporary author who used such devices, but I can let it slide with GH, Dorothy L Sayers and Agatha Christie. Just as I’d challenge a young person who was sexist/homophobic, whatever, but if it was an octogenarian, I’d roll my eyes, think ‘Dinosaur’ and keep my mouth shut.

GH was born in 1902, and was a product of her time - when she wrote this book, she was in her late forties and for her whole life rampant anti-Semitism had been pretty much the norm. In that respect, she is no different from Dickens. Even after WW2, stereotyping of this nature was commonplace. So no, I don’t love it, but I do find I’m able to mentally edit it out in a way I would find impossible to do if it was in contemporary fiction. I get that some people might not be able to edit it out, though. And I would certainly not write GH off entirely - so many of her books are corkers.

Captcha = progress84. Need I say more?

Reading back through the comments, I see that some don’t buy the ‘product of her time’ analysis - but I do. I don’t see, as a previous commenter argued, that acknowledging that certain views were prevalent in any way diminishes the people at that time who didn’t hold them. People are shaped by the prevailing views and mores of their culture. Yes, some have the strength and insight to swim against the tide, and thank goodness for that, for they are the agents of progress, but I don’t think it’s ‘BS’ to suggest that a woman born in 1902 might well have more reason to hold certain attitudes than one born eighty years later.

I just don’t think we can hold the past to the standards of our own time. I would lay money that in 80 years some of the prevailing attitudes in our society will be looked back at in disbelief - and I’m sure that some of those beliefs will be ones that I currently hold (despite my liberal, libertarian stance on almost everything). Minority views arise, challenge the status quo and become majority views.

If GH was anti-Semitic, then she was almost certainly no more anti-Semitic than most of the people around her, what she wrote was almost certainly no more bigoted than much of what she read. To explain isn’t necessarily to excuse; as I said, I would be hugely offended by such blatant stereotyping in a contemporary book, because I would expect more of a contemporary author.

TGS has never been one of my favourite Heyers because I am not happy with the cousin element. Heyer wrote other books with distinct tinged of anti-semitism and snobbery, and I am always well aware of them when reading her…or any other of her contemporaries, from Evelyn Waugh to the allinghams and Sayers. My mother’s parents and uncles/aunts were of that generation also and totally reflected heyer’s world view. It was endemic in the English middle classes, and I can remember challenging my grandfather and great uncle for the way they spoke about Jewish people as late as the 1980s. So I know where she was coming from, although I don’t endorse it.

When we are readers, I think it is important to take different contexts into account because it all teaches us about the way the world is shaped and is altering. There are three types of context I am thinking of: the world within the text (16th century Venice in othello); the world of the writer; the world of the reader. When reading historical fiction, I would say the world of the writer is almost as critical as the setting of the text itself. In at context I don’t endorse heyer’s worldview, but I am prepared to accept it in the context of the book she is writing…in other words it doesn’t render the book a wall banger. Unlike egregious historical errors which really drive me wild.

The Grand Sophy is the only Heyer book I’ve read, and I’m sad to say I didn’t particularly like it. Okay, it wasn’t painful or really bad, but most of the comedy was apparently lost on me (except the horse-face part, which I remembered). I was disappointed with how little romance there was (the end between Charles and Sophy was indeed all but unexpected), and the action didn’t thrill me at all. It’s possible that the fact I read it in Polish might not have helped.

Sarah, can we do a thread on romances that we want to love, we should have loved, everybody else loves them…but that we can’t stand because something just left a bad taste in our mouths?  And I’m not just talking about “it was a different time/old skool romance,” but even stuff in today’s romances that ruins them beyond repair.

I’m glad some other people mention the first-cousin issue in this book as being problematic.  That was the part of the whole story I had to put on the “ignore it and it will go away PLEASE” backburner of my reading mind.  Yet, for the time period in which it took place that was not considered a big icky incestuous deal at all.  Heck, modern readers should find LOADS of problems with any historical book that attempts and attains historical accuracy; from sexism and class-divisions all the way up to and including racism.  Yet, if those historical truths are ignored or reshaped to fit today’s morals then we have to call the writer to the carpet for anachronism.  At the same time I know that every book is a product and representation of the time in which it was written rather than the time in which it takes place.  It’s a marvelous conundrum.

...why did it take 50 years to write The Help?

The Wedding Princess hadn’t grown up yet? The Help is a whole other discussion, but it isn’t the book you must think it is.

This thread is an interesting example of privilege in action. Faced with egregious bigotry in action the majority move not to condemn it but to excuse it. It shouldn’t offend because it is (insert excuse here).

Really, The Help is an excellent example after all. If we turn away and excuse casual bigotry our pleasure reading, then The Help happens.

Come on, Donna. A muff is ALSO a fur fashion accessory for keeping a woman’s hands warm. Cylindirical, it was fur on the outside and some soft fabric on the inside. It might also have little pockets for safekeeping of small objects or a hankie. I imagine the slang terms came from the accessory.

I’m glad some other people mention the first-cousin issue in this book as being problematic.  That was the part of the whole story I had to put on the “ignore it and it will go away PLEASE” backburner of my reading mind.  Yet, for the time period in which it took place that was not considered a big icky incestuous deal at all.

I suspect that cousins marrying is much more of a taboo for US readers. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were first cousins, and Charles Darwin was married to his first cousin.

“This thread is an interesting example of privilege in action. Faced with egregious bigotry in action the majority move not to condemn it but to excuse it. It shouldn’t offend because it is (insert excuse here)”

Hmmm… I would hesitate to call something written 60 years ago “in action” in any sense of the words.  I don’t consider it my sense of privilege, but rather perspective that compels me to view the various injustices and terrible truths of our past in a different way than those going on right now.  True, many of them are the same and/or still in the process of being (I pray) remedied, but I can’t condemn a book every time it pushes a button for me.  I can’t say I didn’t enjoy Gone With The Wind or Tarzan or Bleak House because one had slavery, one had patronizing colonialism/racism and one had crippling poverty and filth thrust on a good portion of the people within.  I know what my own morals/standards are and I stick with them.  A book which trespasses on them should disturb me and reinforce my abhorrence for the current practices of the same sins/crimes, but it mostly makes me sad for the world’s past terrors, grateful for what progress we have made and cautiously hopeful that we can keep going the right way.

@Dede, I know what a muff is. I’m old enough to have had one when the were popular for little girls. It was white rabbit fur & I LOVED it. It was the envy of my classmates. Unfortunately, only good for hand warming as it had no little pockets.

@James Lynch:  I was coming here to say the same thing.  Shylock (and his predecessor/inspiration, Barabas of Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta) is largely a victim of an anti-Semitic society.  I’ve always thought of the character as an example of how oppression can warp the oppressed. 

The problem is, however, that no matter how nuanced the text, anti-Semites have definitely made use of The Merchant of Venice for their own ends.  And given that these were popular entertainments in an anti-Semitic era, it’s unlikely that an Elizabethan audience would have seen much beyond the expected stereotype.

As for Heyer:  I love the Grand Sophy, but I can’t just dismiss that scene.  It wasn’t like people didn’t know what anti-Semitism was in 1950; I think there’s a bit of modern-day hand-waving in the assumption that people didn’t know better back in the day.  Western society had just had an object lesson in the fruits of anti-Semitism.  Israel had declared independence.  Heyer lived in an era that was *not* universally anti-Semitic, and she had to have been exposed to other perspectives.

It’s kind of like the idea that “everyone” thought slavery was okay in the 19th century - actually, it was a controversy that went back to the founding of the Republic; slaveholders were well aware that a substantial segment of American society thought slaveholding was morally indefensible.

The Help is a whole other discussion, but it isn’t the book you must think it is.

Thanks, Meoskop.  I was biting my tongue about that trying to not respond.  In fact, I quietly second pretty much all of what you said.

People are shaped by the prevailing views and mores of their culture. Yes, some have the strength and insight to swim against the tide, and thank goodness for that, for they are the agents of progress, but I don’t think it’s ‘BS’ to suggest that a woman born in 1902 might well have more reason to hold certain attitudes than one born eighty years later.

I think the issue here is assuming that people are EITHER heroic agents of progress who swim against the tide, or merely passive objects who float with a huge impersonal “tide” that they have nothing to do with.  If people are either super-duper heroes or simply “products of their time” who exactly are the people who invented and created the racism of yester-year?  Do we assume that all people are “victims” of circumstance and that the “circumstances” which shaped their world view were totally anonymous - the invisible hands of God or the marketplace, perhaps?  That’s a awfully big loophole in terms of individual responsibility (and one which I think has been pretty much rejected by international law since the Nuremberg trials).

Racism at least is a CREATED phenomenon, mostly for the sake of economic advantage.  (Read the stunned and horrified denunciations of those who enslave Africans based on skin color of Portuguese theologians in the fifteenth century, and then read the otherwise humane Las Casas one hundred years later.  It is possible to create a mindset frighteningly easily.)  As a writer (i.e. someone who has access to and shapes public opinion) posing as the passive receptacle of received attitudes becomes even more problematic.  “No position” IS a position, a tacit endorsement of the status quo.

That much is generally true.  In terms of the specific writers discussed here - Heyer, Sayers, and Marsh (all of whom I love) - I think it’s fair to point out that they specifically go out of their way to mock and belittle all of those characters who would historically have been the ones to “swim against the tide” and be “agents of progress.”  Much as I love Strong Poison, the basic message is that those who are “bohemians” (consciously left-wing artists, who condemn the prevailing attitudes toward class and sex) are sweetly naive and deluded at best, and horrible hypocrites (who more or less deserve to be murdered) at worst.  Marsh has at least one mystery where the murderer [SPOILER] turns out to be the “red” radical, who is once again revealed as venal, as well as loud, obnoxious and generally not like the salt-of-the-earth peasants who don’t want to get above their station.  Heyer’s treatment of “radicals” is more gently mocking, as there are occasional comical family members who do NOT want their daughters/sisters/etc. to marry self-evidently marvelous aristocrats, but who are invariably vanquished by the determined ladies in questions (sometimes with some help from the duke in question).  Within the context of the novels, these scenes are by turns funny, thrilling, engaging and satisfying, BUT I think it is naive to say that they are not actively FORMING the “tide” against those people who seriously fought for social justice.

I’m not advocating for art in the service of worthy social propaganda.  But I do believe that writers have a responsibility to be as aware as possible of the mindset they are propagating, and I think it’s completely fair to call them on it.  If they’re alive, that may mean dialogue with the actual author.  In the case of the dead, it’s only a question of being aware of the poison when reading, and not pretending that it isn’t there (or avoiding it, if it’s completely too painful to read).

It’s not “cheap” or “easy” condemnation (as someone up the thread wrote).  It’s difficult and painful, and the more we love the rest of the author’s work, the more painful it is, just as it is painful to call out the evil spoken or done by beloved older family members.  We call it out BECAUSE we love them, and want them to be better, or want to understand HOW someone so beloved could be so hurtful.  Or how such an otherwise talented author could have written such crap.  Because let’s face it, the art of characterization is basically linked to extremely accurate observation of traits.  And when you come with a set of prejudices you basically put on giant blinkers and green goggles, and anything you try to “observe” about a specific character will come out a stereotype, and be poor writing.

I think it is often what you are sensitive to. Not “over” sensitive, but what bigotry is noticable to different people. I stopped reading the Jaz Parks series, which smart bitches had nothing but good things to say about, because of how uncomfortable I got with the off-handed racism in some parts. An example similar to this situation was the unnecessary jokes about a taxi driver and his hilarious inability to just speak English. Completely lazy use of an offensive trope, but at least Heyer had a need for a villain. In this case, there was no reason to add this but a change to laugh about foreign cab drivers.

Well, in terms of ‘product of her times…’  I’ve always had a sincere hate for the first Queen Elizabeth since I read that she had live cats collected, caged, and burned to death for her amusement.  Product of her times?  Sure.  Would I kick her in the shins for it, given the chance?  You bet.  Was it perfectly normal, for her time?  Probably so.  But I’m sure there were plenty of people of that time who kept cats as helpful vermin-control agents, and took care of them.  Still, Lizzie didn’t kill those cats herself—other people did it for her, and other people laughed.  Cats were agents of Satan, or so everyone ‘knew.’

Recognition of a prevailing condition isn’t condoning or excusing it, and it’s not as though human civilization (as embodied by the readers of this fine blog) has reached its pinnacle. 

The “first cousins squick” is a prime example.  The first time I ran across it, I was taken aback, but when I actually looked it up, no taboo.  My guess is that it comes from small, isolated communities in the US—of which there were many, before the auto became common; most people never traveled more than 50 miles from where they were born.  There were many places, particularly in the rural South, where close-kin marriages produced the physical problems that were the reason for incest taboos.  And such liaisons in wealthy families, intended to concentrate wealth, created some problems, too. 

BUT:  As others have said, there is really NO RATIONAL REASON for squickation by first-cousin marriage.  None. 

And yet—are any of you who are squicked by it horrified at your own prejudice?  Because that’s all it is—an aversion no more rational than the ones against interracial or same-sex unions.

I always have to suspend my disbelief when reading or writing stories that deal with earlier times, when a few people lived very, very well but most people were facing lifelong drudgery from before dawn to well past dark.  And I try not to let my own good guys forget that the ‘lesser orders’ are human.  But that’s a tightrope, too—an overload of 20th-century attitudes (I’m not sure what a 21st century attitude is, yet, and I’m a product of the 20th) will wreck an historical as much as too heavy adherence to outdated beliefs.

congress64… now, orgies do squick me.  64 is way too many participants for ‘congress’

WRT QE1 and cats; cats WERE minions of the devil to many in those times. In fact, the wholesale slaughter of cats helped give rise to plague, since rats were not adequately controlled. It also may have helped give rise to a number of vermin-hunting small dogs; Min Pins are a German breed but are quite old and may have originated during that time. Dogs were acceptable, cats were not. And it was also a very common theme to torture/kill animals for amusement and sport. Bull baiting anyone? Cock fighting got its start in those times as well.

As far as first cousin marriage, it goes back way before the American South. I am not a historian so I know I will get at least part of this messed up, but wasn’t marriage within a certain degree of closeness strictly prohibited by the Catholic church? Does marrying close have consequences? Actually it certainly can. For instance, the Amish tend to have a number of specific genetic disorders due to very close intermarriage over time.

Homozygosity (lack of variance, or heterozygosity in the genes) can be both beneficial and detrimental. Purebred dog breeds, bred for centuries only to individuals of their own breed, tend to be quite homozygous. In simple terms, breeding closely in the gene pool will double up on both good and “bad” genes and will be more likely to lead to the exposure and expression of recessives. A recessive gene can be as benign as blue eyes or as dangerous as cancer. Most humans, first cousins are not, are matched due to love, or (then) political alliance. Genetic defect and disease being pretty much last in line for any attention. Therefore there tends to be more likelihood for problems. Dogs (and cattle and horses) have been bred for health, working ability and longevity rather than because Rex has fallen madly in love with Fluffy. Therefore we have many dog breeds who are quite inbred yet live long healthy lives. And there’s my genetics discussion for the day!

I learnt a long time ago that it is very difficult for most people (including me) to even recognise the societal norms in which they grow up, let alone to step outside them and come to opposite views.  Even those of us who think that we are now enlightened and right thinking are almost certain to find out in future years and decades that we are not, and that we need to develop and change our views.

Faellie:  thank you for your words of wisdom. :-)  It is very easy to see the faults of the past, and extremely difficult to look ahead to the future, and see how we will be rated by future generations.  It ill behoves us to castigate our forebears for being products of their culture, when we are also products of ours,

Back to the ‘first cousins’ issue:  as Laura implied, this is totally an American hang-up.  On checking the facts, I find that the USA, alone in the western world, actually has laws against first-cousin marriage in many states.  Europe, the Middle East, Australia, have no problem with first-cousin marriage. 

As I have said before, first cousins are within the permitted degrees of consanguinity in most religious law (Catholics have vacillated a bit, historically, usually in the form of permitting such marriages, but making them the subject of a dispensation).  In the past, first-cousin marriage was very common in Europe for a number of reasons.  At present, in the UK, around half of the (often arranged) marriages in the British Pakistani community are between first cousins, so there’s certainly still plenty of it about in my own society. 

What this amounts to is that a modern American reader gets all twitchy about the cousin thing, while the rest of us barely notice it, and certainly don’t find it in the least disturbing.  Cultural differences, again.  I notice all sorts of things in contemporary American fiction that are weird, to me, but I accept that I am reading about a different culture.  Approval or disapproval is not really the issue.  It is all about learning about human variability, the ways in which we are alike, and the ways in which we are different.

Dogs used to be bred for sensible goals—these days all it takes is a look at the breed-related health problems of show dogs to see that fashion has replaced common sense.  I don’t know about horses—I hope it’s different but knowing humans, I doubt it.

I know the incest taboo is much older—I was referring to what others have noted, that the cousin taboo is more common in Americans than Europeans.  It isn’t all in the US, though, I’ve heard Brits joke about Royal genes.  Sayers has a line about it, in fact—when Wimsey is dithering over being a father because of supposed genetic weakness, Harriet says something to the effect that his brother married his own cousin, but his sister married a commoner and their kids are all right. 

If someone’s got a genetic predisposition to problems, sure, it would be risky to marry a relative.  Long-term inbreeding is a bad idea.  But there’s genetic screening for problems now, or amniocentesis, or if it’s a very serious issue, adoption. 

I’d veer away from marrying a cousin because I think it’s better for kids to get a little way out of the nest before settling down themselves.  Cross-pollination IS healthier, no question.  But for most people, first-cousin marriage isn’t much of a risk.

Uh Lee, as someone who has owned purebred dogs for over 25 years, including show dogs, who does contract work for the Orthopedic foundation for Animals, which holds the largest dog health database in the world, and who knows a lot of dog breeders AND show dogs AND show dogs that function quite well in their ancestral role, there are so many inaccuracies in your statement about dog breeding it’s hard to know where to start. And since this isn’t the list for it, I won’t.

Suffice it to say that there are some very highly inbred breeds out there that regularly live long, healthy lives into their teens. And some heterozygous breeds with an unholy hell’s worth of genetic issues. A couple of years ago the BBC came out with a wildly inaccurate portrayal of dogs and dog breeds which has since been accepted as gospel. And while it is absolutely true that there are some breeds that have huge problems, the vast majority do not. And mixed breed dogs actually have the genetic ability to get far more inherited disease than most purebred breeds….

Anyway, sorry, if anyone wants to talk dog genetics feel free to contact me privately at robinjn @ gmail.com (close spaces). As it pertains to humans, the problem comes with “breeding close” with no attention to genetic disease consequence.

I’m not sure where the idea is coming from that first cousin marriage is a peculiarly American squick.

For the US, it’s certainly the case that many states still prohibit first-cousin marriage (either entirely or for couples who are younger than late middle age), so it is not “merely” a cultural squick but one that is reinforced by state law.

The Catholic Church has effectively prohibited it at various times since the 13th century; even today first cousins need dispensation from the church to marry. Rules in the Greek and Russian Orthodix churches include prohibitions against 2nd cousin marriages as well. Obviously these rules cover non-American Christians in Europe and elsewhere.

Within Hinduism the rules vary by region. Hindus in north and central India are largely prohibited from marrying first cousins by caste rules, but South Indians are not as uniformly barred from the practice.

I’m with Sarah on this, and I should probably keep my mouth shut, since this is one of my hot button personal issues and it borders on politics, and I’ve been on the road for four days and so haven’t seen this unfold…but basically, screw keeping my mouth shut, I’m going to say this anyway.

I love Georgette Heyer’s writing, but when I read this book that characterization totally killed the book for me. I read a lot of Dickens, too—he writes in my time period, and it’s just necessary to read him to try to get a feel for what he thinks—and every time I’m beginning to sink into one of his stories, GOD DAMN he lets a massive stereotype loose, and it kills any enjoyment I get from reading.

I insist on judging Heyer by today’s standards. I live in today. I read in today. My enjoyment of a book is irrevocably determined by who I am, today. If Heyer were a living author, I would think long and hard before buying her books, simply because I would have a serious problem sending money her way.

I don’t think anyone deserves a pass, ever, for harboring serious prejudices based on immutable characteristics. No matter when they lived. And yes, I’m saying that as a product of today—but I’m also saying it as someone who has been told to shut up when Venerated Old Person says something racist because she “can’t help it” and she grew up in an era when it was “okay” to say things like that, and so we should all just let them say it.

Ultimately, I just can’t handle being told that it’s not okay to criticize someone because “everyone else was doing it.” Or that somehow someone deserves a pass because she was a product of her times. When “everyone else is doing it” is precisely the moment when someone needs to be criticized. I wish this review had been written for this book when it came out in 1950, but it wasn’t, and I’m glad as hell it was written today.

But suppose I did buy the “product of her times” thing for people who literally are never exposed to an alternate way of looking at the world. 

We’re not talking about the kind of person who has never seen a Jew, and who only knows what they were told by their grandmother. We’re talking about Georgette Heyer. I can tell by reading her books that she was a brilliant, educated, intelligent woman with keen insight into human nature and an extraordinary capacity for research.

If she’d once bothered to think of Jews as human, she would have figured out pretty quickly, based on all available evidence, just how wrong she was to vilify them. It’s perfectly legitimate to criticize her for not employing the talents that she so ably used in every other arena here. The woman who boasts that her research is unparalleled doesn’t once bother talking to a single Jew? Or reading their history? Or finding out one single thing about them? And she continues with this attitude after World War II so ably demonstrated that those kinds of caricatures could have lasting, devastating consequences?

How does Georgette Heyer, researcher extraordinaire, get a free pass for that? How does one of the most intelligent women around manage to avoid thinking about what was a hotly debated topic back then? Her racism in 1950 was a choice—maybe just a choice to not challenge herself, but a choice nonetheless, and absolutely I can hold her to task for that. This wasn’t a situation where literally everyone thought the world was flat and nobody had challenged the received wisdom, and she wasn’t so disconnected as to be unaware, nor so incapable of critical thought as to simply persist in her beliefs when challenged. She was given much by way of education and talent, and on this particular issue, she completely dropped the ball. It’s the Georgette Heyer’s of the 1950s who most deserve criticism.

I love Heyer’s writing. I do. I just bought a boatload of her books on $1.99 sale. But I have very little respect for Heyer the racist, and when the one eclipses the other, as it does in this book, I have to get up and walk away, and I can hardly blame someone else for feeling the same way.

I’m not sure where the idea is coming from that first cousin marriage is a
peculiarly American squick.

I didn’t even know there was a squick about it until I started reading US blogs/sites about romance, so as a result I now associate the squick reaction with Americans. I didn’t mean to imply that only Americans are squicked by first cousin marriage.

Oh, and I also didn’t mean to imply that all Americans are squicked by it.

I don’t think we can decide on the basis of one scene in one book whether Heyer was anti-Semitic, nor do I think it matters to how we judge the book. But the “product of her times” argument bothers me: people change. Just what “time” are we a product of? Heyer was born in 1902, but she wrote this book when she was almost 50. If she hadn’t changed any of her views of life in those years, I’d be surprised, and I wouldn’t think much of her. My grandmother was also born in 1902. She lived for 94 years, and over the course of those years, she changed her views on a lot of things (she learned to accept her gay son, for instance). Having 1902 views in 1950, if Heyer did so, is not something we should hand-wave away.

@LauraV: I didn’t think you meant to imply that either. You are invariably precise in your language. But it’s come up on this thread and the other Heyer thread. I agree that in the context here, it’s about what romance readers find normal/abnormal, and the boards may be dominated by American and UK readers (or at least we talk the most about this). I’ve seen it in discussions at AAR’s boards as well in the past.

My personal experience and my academic research on Hindu marriage patterns reinforces the cousin-marriage ban in non-southern India, so I never thought it was just about Americans.

Jack Goody has a provocative explanation for the Catholic prohibition, focusing on the financial motivations of the Church. Skimming a few scholarly works on the subject, I have seen figures that range from 20% to 43% (unit of measure is societies allowing cousin-marriage). Whichever figure you choose, it clearly incorporates far more than the US.

If we’re talking about that which squicks us with Heyer, Leonie in These Old Shades acted so very, very childishly…I would have put her at about 8 in the opening scenes and certainly no older than 10…that the entire romance between her and the Duke gave me the creeps. It was SLIGHTLY better by the end, but only slightly.

I don’t think trying to understand the context of someone’s racism is ‘giving them a free pass.’ It does help to understand that they’re not deliberately trying to be offensive.

First cousin marriage never bothered me until I wrote one and my editor at an American publishing house said, “you can’t do that!” She seemed genuinely horrified and I couldn’t understand it.
If you check the tables of consanguinity, first cousin marriage has never been prohibited. Since the Catholic church wasn’t just a spiritual organisation, but a political one in times gone by, it was useful to hold back on occasion.

And yes, I agree, to condemn Heyer and accuse her of anti-Semitism beecause of one scene in one book does seem a but OTT.

And I’ve come back mainly because of the reference to Leonie in “These Old Shades.” Yes, that is my Heyer squick book. There’s some evidence that Heyer wrote Leonie as much younger than the 19 she is stated to be, and may have put the age in as an afterthought. Leonie behaves childishly. “I’m glad the pig man is dead” are the words of an immature child, not an adult, and Avon is constantly referring to her as “child” and “infant” and “mignonne” and “little one.” It made me shudder when I read it at 15 and it makes me shudder now. Avon is a great character, but he should have someone with the strength to stand up to him, not a child.

And yes, I’m saying that as a product of today—but I’m also saying it as someone who has been told to shut up when Venerated Old Person says something racist because she “can’t help it” and she grew up in an era when it was “okay” to say things like that, and so we should all just let them say it.

Thank you Courtney Milanfor letting me know I’m not the only one. I actually shook my finger in my father’s face and told him I NEVER wanted to hear that word out of his mouth again. I’m not sure what shocked me more; that the man who taught me not to judge a book by it’s cover & not to act like I’m better than anyone for any reason used a slur I had never heard cross his lips before, or the fact that he gave me a look that said he had no idea what I was talking about. Unless they have Alzheimer’s, it’s never too late to correct bad language. 

And the squick about 1st cousins? As someone who works for an orthopaedic surgeon who treats a lot of babies with polydactyly - yes, there are damn good reason to reproduce outside your own gene pool.

I must be very strange in that reading through this thread, that I’m suddenly consumed by nothing so much as the desire to read ‘The Goldhanger Inheritance’; a big expansive series of novels set in Regency London, where our Jewish widower hero, and the daughter that in his grief he taught to shoot pistols, crack safes, pick pockets and do double entry book-keeping, of whom he is very proud indeed, jointly run their banking house whilst solving crimes involving impecunious young noblemen coming to grief in and around the Port of London and the East End.

Oh, and on Francis Cheviot from ‘The Reluctant Widow’—who I think someone mentioned as Heyer’s offensively stereotyped gay character—if you squint at him, and tilt your head just right,  you realise in a flash that he is soooooooo very, very much the dark, patriotic, but utterly ruthless gay secret-agent hero; just of a completely different series of novels that only happen to cross streams with Heyer’s book at that one point. And now I have yet another non-existent set of stories that I want to read.

The plot bunnies have gotten me…aargh!

*standing ovation to Courtney Milan*  I’m glad I’ve spent money on your books. You said that beautifully.

And SKapusniak, it’s not quite the series you describe, but Lady Barbara’s Dilemma is a Regency romance where the B couple is Jewish, but of different classes and degrees of religiosity. Deborah Cohen is the daughter of a widowed merchant, not a moneylender, and she doesn’t shoot pistols or crack safes, but I enjoyed her plotline very much—and the Jewish identity of her and her hero, Sir David Treves, creates a major plot bump for the A couple. Highly recommended. Although I would love to read either of the other series you described as well! Someone get on that, pls.

@Courtney Milan

Thank you!! For brilliantly articulating what should be common sense…

There’s some evidence that Heyer wrote Leonie as much younger than the 19 she is stated to be, and may have put the age in as an afterthought.

I think Heyer probably envisaged her as about 14.  There are dozens of reasons why Léonie cannot possibly be 19, as stated, and Heyer herself, in Devil’s Cub, implies that she was then not much past 40, when her son was 24.  But These Old Shades is technically riddled with faults.  Still works as a romantic story, though — and remember how very young the author was when she wrote it. 

I had forgotten that there was a gay character in The Reluctant Widow (one of my non-favourites, which I have read only once), but there is certainly one in the contemporary early ‘50s whodunnit Duplicate Death, and he is a grotesque and very cruel caricature of a young, gay male.  There are gay characters in Penhallow, too, but that’s such a peculiar book that I can’t remember how they come over.  It’s like Cold Comfort Farm without the humour and whimsy.

I know I am repeating myself (and also repeating some points made by SB Sarah) but all of us have hot buttons, subjects that we find very hard to stand back from and assess in a detached way, subjects that are deal-breakers for us in a fictional narrative.  That’s normal and human.  I could never enjoy a book that featured animal cruelty in a casual way, for example. 

What I think we all need to consider is the diversity of human experience.  Some of you think that bondage and domination/submission, or sexual fantasies involving shape-shifting or bloodsucking, are fine:  for me, they are really major, major anaphrodisiacs, to the point of nauseated revulsion.  ‘Squick’ isn’t in it.  But at the same time, some of you think that a 20-year age difference between sex partners, or the marriage of first cousins, is pretty disgusting and depraved, while to me they are perfectly normal, acceptable aspects of human sexuality.  We have to remember that our own points of view are so strongly influenced by our personal and cultural backgrounds that it requires a considerable effort of will to see them from another perpective. 

Indeed, the very root of bigotry is the inability to understand that one’s own personal experience and cultural conditioning are not universal:  that there are other ways of seeing, and that people who see in different ways are not always or necessarily misguided, let alone evil, but merely different.  The knowledge does not necessarily alter one’s own beliefs and principles, but it can make one more tolerant, understanding and generous.

First Cousins- I know of a couple who immigrated from the same town in Poland about 100 years ago. They entered the US through separate points and one of them lied about where they came from. They married (first cousins). Their kids were OK, but one of their children married a second cousin and their children were not OK. Seriously not.
I have a former relative by marriage who complained about cousins marrying when she moved to a rural area, then she divorced her husband and married her cousin. She has four children with the second husband, the third has a rare neurological disorder that seriously impacts his entire life. (It is stunning that he lived through his first few years.) Since these are the only first-cousin marriages I actually know, I haven’t had the squick erased. I think I am more bothered by first cousins raised together since childhood (because they seem like near-siblings or my cousins seem like near-siblings to me) than a case like Sophie and Charles where they don’t really know each other until they are adults. But I still love “Behold Here’s Poison” with its first cousin H-and-h who know each other their whole lives.

Francis from Reluctant Widow - ruthless and smart, trying to keep his father from treason - I like the idea of spy novels featuring him. And don’t we need Georgette FanFic to counteract the parts that bother us? Maybe something like the Marvel no-prize award winners that explain the inexplicable.

What everyone else said about what Courtney said.  Right on!

@lizzie (greeneyedfem): I love that idea about Francis Cheviot!  Have you seen the interview with Dennis Rake in The Sorrow and the Pity?  Aside from the fact that any man named “Rake” obviously deserves to be the hero of a novel, his real life exploits probably are stranger than fiction.

@Courtney Milan: I also think it is so important to criticize works of the past to ensure these ideologies are not reinforced.  I do think Heyer should be read critically in historical perspective.  She should have known better given her research skills, but she chose not to. 

If taken to the extreme, any number of prejudices can be justified as “a product of its time.”  We should look at issues, such as the antisemitism in historical context, but also with a contemporary critical eye.

While some people may say Heyer shouldn’t be judged on one scene in one book and that she is not antisemitic, I say:

This is a clear case of economic antisemitism where the villain is portrayed as a greedy money lender and we are constantly reminded of how Jewish he looks and acts.  I assume that Heyer edited her books, and that someone else also edited them.  It would be pretty hard if one wasn’t antisemitic to reread this portion many times and not think there was a problem with it.  Antisemitism comes in many forms, and while Heyer may not have been burning synagogues, she was part of a casual antisemitism wrought by casually used harmful stereotypes.

We need to understand the historical context in order to better understand the prejudice.  However, it doesn’t mean that criticism should go away.  In fact, it is a better reason to critique.

I’m suddenly consumed by nothing so much as the desire to read ‘The Goldhanger Inheritance’ [...] Oh, and on Francis Cheviot from ‘The Reluctant Widow’—who I think someone mentioned as Heyer’s offensively stereotyped gay character—if you squint at him, and tilt your head just right,  you realise in a flash that he is soooooooo very, very much the dark, patriotic, but utterly ruthless gay secret-agent hero; just of a completely different series of novels that only happen to cross streams with Heyer’s book at that one point.

Perhaps they could also cross streams with the characters in the first novel in Carola Dunn’s Rothschild Trilogy:

Miss Jacobson’s Journey
Having refused the man her parents chose for her, Miriam Jacobson finds herself smuggling gold across Napoleon’s France to Wellington in Spain, accompanied by two attractive young men, both of whom detest her—and each other.

@LynneConnolly

I did check those, as well as the Catholic Encyclopeda, which is very helpful in explaining the historical back-and-forth between German and Roman degrees of consanguinity. And the (Sir) Jack Goody reference is this one:
http://books.google.com/books?id=LVkYFGqylfQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=jack+goody&hl=en&ei=SsRKTpjyKsj40gHp763rBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAzgK#v=onepage&q&f;=false

With Francis from Reluctant Widow—it’s not the character that bothered me, but the way others spoke of him.  Sure, someone like him might make an interesting hero, but I’m just tired of ‘dark and ruthless.’

it is so important to criticize works of the past to ensure these ideologies are not reinforced.  I do think Heyer should be read critically in historical perspective.

Well… it is so important IF one is reading from a critical, academic perspective and has the inclination to footnote every single thing that varies from one’s own ethical standards.  I seriously doubt that most casual readers would seek out such critique, because most of the readers I’ve encountered simply don’t care about historical accuracy all that much.  Some romance fans avoid historicals because they’re ‘too much work.’

Personally, I don’t usually read from a sociological perspective; I am already far more critical of fiction since I started writing, and when I come across something like the Golddingus scene, I mentally roll my eyes, say, “yeah, nose-in-the-air British stereotype, up yours, Georgette,” and go on reading.  I do know a few people who read with the inner academic ‘on’ most of the time—my wife, for instance—but when I read for relaxation I know, in advance, that authors do not always subscribe to my personal ideals.

Everyone has different ideas of what is ‘important.’  I’d be more likely to spend my time promoting an online petition to make birth-control accessible, or oppose the current racism afoot in the US, than spend the same amount of time criticizing an author who’s been dead for a few decades.  Not that the criticism isn’t deserved, but once an author is dead, what are you going to do?  The idea of re-editing for ‘acceptable’ portrayals is a can of worms I wouldn’t want to open.

@Rebecca:

Much as I love Strong Poison, the basic message is that those who are “bohemians” (consciously left-wing artists, who condemn the prevailing attitudes toward class and sex) are sweetly naive and deluded at best, and horrible hypocrites (who more or less deserve to be murdered) at worst.

In this case, knowing something about Sayer’s background, I’m not surprised and I’d let it slide. From Wikipedia: When she was 29, Dorothy Sayers fell in love with novelist John Cournos; it was the first intense romance of her life. He wanted her to ignore social mores and live with him without marriage, but she wanted to marry and have children. After a year of agony between 1921 and 1922, she learned that Cournos had claimed to be against marriage only to test her devotion, and she broke off her relationship with him.

Harriet, in Gaudy Night is quite autobiographical.

Personally, *I* might have a sneaking wish that someone who treated me that way be horribly murdered. Is it any wonder she saw “bohemians” as either naive and deluded (herself) or horrible hypocrites who deserve to be murdered (her ex)?

As an Italian-American, I don’t know any A. amateur boxers, B. tacky New Jersey housewives, or C. Mafiosi. But that’s almost all one sees represented as “Italian-American” in entertainment. It stinks, but it didn’t prevent me from appreciating the storytelling and performances in, say, The Sopranos.

Heyer’s personal anti-Semitism (of which I wasn’t aware before) makes me lose respect for her as a person, definitely, but I manage to grit my teeth and get through that part without letting it destroy my overall enjoyment of the story.

The prejudice is, unfortunately, historically and geographically accurate. But Heyer could have (and should have) been a lot more subtle about it. Readers in 1950 certainly would have been able to fill in the stereotypical physical description anyway, attitudes being what they were then, and modern readers don’t need the description to make the scene work.

@Dragoness: Yeah, but that gets into the Aaron Sorkin principle, to wit: your creative works are not your personal therapy session, and I’m not giving you seven bucks to provide a safe space for your issues.

If you can file the serial numbers off your relationship with your mother/father/ex/third-grade teacher and create a good story without insulting entire groups of people, go you. Seriously—when you do it well, letting your life inform your work produces some very cool, very powerful material. But if the work you produce *is* offensive, I’m not going to give you a pass because of your Traumatic Backstory—no more than I’d give my friends a pass for making hurtful generalizations when they get dumped.

@Lee Rowan: On the one hand, yeah—I do that too. It’s fine to overlook stuff. I don’t think anyone here has said or even implied that it’s *not*: everyone’s been very careful to say that you can still read and enjoy books with problematic messages.

On the other hand, I could stand to see a little less of the implied “well, why are you wasting your time on this” message, thanks. The value of social justice criticism aside, most people aren’t choosing between making an internet post to the effect that a book has some issues and feeding hungry orphans or even signing a petition. I’m on here because I’m waiting for a phone call at work: if I wasn’t commenting, I’d be over at TVTropes or reading through Achewood. Such is the Internet.

@ Lee:  Maybe for some flat reading is pleasurable.  For me it would be boring.  When something bothers me, I try to understand it.  I try to think of it in historical context and then also try to discern why I am bothered.  It may not be my dissertation topic, but it doesn’t take me any longer because that is just the way I think.

I seem to have plenty of time for my social and political causes, my interdisciplinary dissertation, a 40-hour/week job, and romance novels.  Some of my psychologist friends may call it hypo-mania, I call it happily productive. ;)

I can’t see any suggestion that Georgette Heyer ever had any education outside the home, and in the home her education consisted of being “encouraged to read widely”.  The only thing unusual about that for a woman of her time and class might be the amount of reading.  I think it unlikely that there were many/any books in existence while she was growing up and forming her opinions which would have discussed racial and religious discrimination, in those terms.  I doubt there were many, or even any, that discussed it in those terms even by 1950.  There would have been a few by the time she died in 1974, but they still wouldn’t have been general reading, or even on most school or university curricula, outside sociology courses at universities.  Nor it is obvious to me that in 1950 the recent convulsions of WWII would have been connected to and have changed the then-existing interpretations of English Regency society. 

It is perhaps easy to forget how recent (and fragile) current thinking on discrimination is.  (Still no equal rights amendment for women in the USA, I think? Got a bit of a way to go, there, then, even in the current culture of anti-discrimination.)

As for knowing jews, England in the time Heyer was growing up was in fact a very homogenous society with little immigration outside specific locations.  Until the late 1930s and beyond, the jewish population in London would have been almost wholly concentrated in the north and east, a long way away from the outer south-west suburb in which Heyer grew up - the Wimbledon synagogue was only founded in 1949.  If Heyer did know jews, in her family or socially or through business, I can assure you that the polite mores of English society of her time and class would have prevented any inquiry on matters of race and religion outside her own family.  And even if she had family to ask and their knowledge had not been lost, what would she have been told which she could have accurately applied to the English Regency period, given that her ancestors were not in England at the time?

I can understand not liking what Heyer wrote, not wanting to read it, and saying that in today’s terms it is unacceptable.  Those are all reasonable and logical points of view.  But to criticise her personally for not complying with standards in place 35 years after her death is in my view anachronistic, and betrays a limited understanding of human history and society.

Thank you, Faellie.  :-)
I think you, Lynne and I (and maybe a couple of others) are still not getting through, though.

Long-time SBTB reader here and what strikes me is that this thread contains some of the deepest discussion you could find anywhere on the internets and yet remains utterly civilised, informed and respectful. Go ladies!

On other matters: I am a Grand Sophy fan-girl of many years and SBSarah, you have made me view the book differently and also realise that I will quite happily gloss over and ignore things in a book if they don’t suit me - you quite rightly called me out on that. Doesn’t mean I love Sophy less, but I will read it with my eyes more open in future.

On cousins marrying - not squicky for me in historicals at all (I’m a Brit), but though I love the background of Mary Stewart’s The Gabriel Hounds I just cannot bear to read it because the H/h are first cousins whose fathers are twins and whose mothers are unrelated but have a strong physical resemblance, and much is made of the closeness of the family relationship. Completely icks me out.

AgTigress, I remember your paper at the Heyer conference - that was a very good day!

When a comment begins with a mistake as basic as this one:

I can’t see any suggestion that Georgette Heyer ever had any education outside the home

it leads to an understandable skepticism about the validity of the rest of the argument.

For evidence to the contrary see Hodge’s biography of Heyer, pp. 3-6. Heyer attended two different girls’ day schools in Wimbledon. Hodge describes Heyer’s father as “a natural and inspiring teacher.”

Sunita: that is new information to me, thank you.  Does the biography give details of curricula followed at these schools or similar schools that would have dealt with discrimination issues such that it made a difference?  Socially varied population of teachers and pupils at the schools she attended?  Heyer’s father’s own views that he might have passed on to his children?  Thanks.

@Annabelle

On other matters: I am a Grand Sophy fan-girl of many years and SBSarah, you have made me view the book differently and also realise that I will quite happily gloss over and ignore things in a book if they don’t suit me - you quite rightly called me out on that. Doesn’t mean I love Sophy less, but I will read it with my eyes more open in future.

I was quite depressed that some chose to defend Heyer’s questionable portrayal/stance instead of respecting, acknowledging and/or accepting SB Sarah’s right to her reaction and concerns. Your response - respecting Sarah’s reaction, being that willing to listen to (and respect) another perspective and owning your privilege while still loving this novel, warts and all - has improved my mood. Big time. Thank you for that.

you have made me view the book differently and also realise that I will quite happily gloss over and ignore things in a book if they don’t suit me - you quite rightly called me out on that. Doesn’t mean I love Sophy less, but I will read it with my eyes more open in future.

I’m equally prepared to gloss over and ignore objectionable content, provided there are still positive elements I can take away from a story.  Take a book like GONE WITH THE WIND.  It contains the most appalling racism; even the hero supports the KKK.  But it also contains some great moments of dialogue and characterization, for example Rhett’s droll, outspoken cynicism and Melanie’s gentle faith in the people she loves.  For every steaming turd of racism, there’s a shining nugget of romance gold.  The nuggets don’t make me admire the turds any more than the turds make me hate the nuggets.  I just try to recognize both elements for what they are, the very good and the very bad, and temper my re-reads and recommendations accordingly.

@Maili, in response to Annabelle

On other matters: I am a Grand Sophy fan-girl of many years and SBSarah, you have made me view the book differently and also realise that I will quite happily gloss over and ignore things in a book if they don’t suit me - you quite rightly called me out on that. Doesn’t mean I love Sophy less, but I will read it with my eyes more open in future. (Annabelle)

I was quite depressed that some chose to defend Heyer’s questionable portrayal/stance instead of respecting, acknowledging and/or accepting SB Sarah’s right to her reaction and concerns. Your response - respecting Sarah’s reaction, being that willing to listen to (and respect) another perspective and owning your privilege while still loving this novel, warts and all - has improved my mood. Big time. Thank you for that. (Maili)

I’m actually pretty impressed at the civility of this discourse, especially considering the sensitive topic, and I never thought that anyone’s positing, “But what if—”, or trying to understand why Heyer would hold such attitudes, or even playing devil’s advocate came off as disrespecting, ignoring, or being unaccepting of SBSarah’s quite valid concerns and criticisms. I hope that she agrees. :-)

though I love the background of Mary Stewart’s The Gabriel Hounds I just cannot bear to read it because the H/h are first cousins whose fathers are twins and whose mothers are unrelated but have a strong physical resemblance,

Anabelle, I like that particular Stewart chiefly for the setting, too, and although I recalled that the h/h were cousins, I simply hadn’t remembered the details about their parents.  Genetically, offspring of identical twins are, of course, closer than those of ordinary siblings (whether twins or not).

Yes, the Cambridge conference was fun.

The cousin-marriage has never been a squick issue for me, but I think it’s interesting that even in the UK there have been calls for a ban on such marriages several times within the last few years.  Mostly this is a result of pockets of close communities where such marriages are relatively common and research has demonstrated that there are indeed higher than average rates of birth defects.  See here, here, and here.  I think it’s entirely possible we might see a ban here within the next 10 years.

I’m actually pretty impressed at the civility of this discourse, especially considering the sensitive topic, and I never thought that anyone’s positing, “But what if—”, or trying to understand why Heyer would hold such attitudes, or even playing devil’s advocate came off as disrespecting, ignoring, or being unaccepting of SBSarah’s quite valid concerns and criticisms. I hope that she agrees. :-)

@Michele,
I quite agree. In fact, I think that the conversation has benefited from differing viewpoints, since we are more likely to think critically about a topic if multiple arguments are presented. This particularly lively discussion just demonstrates why I love the community here at SBTB so much.

@Faellie:
Hodge only spends four pages on Heyer’s girlhood, so there is very little detail. She interviewed a schoolmate who is described as the daughter of a High Court Judge. That would suggest the school had a middle- to upper-middle class enrollment (this is around WW1). The other school is described as “socially conscious” by Hodge, whatever she means by that (I can think of a number of different meanings, but I think liberal is probably the most likely). 

Perhaps Jennifer Kloester’s forthcoming biography will have more material on Heyer’s early years. Hodge emphasizes her closeness to her father, who was a well-regarded teacher at a prep school in Wimbledon and who also contributed to Punch, but I don’t remember much else (I don’t have the book available in the house I’m in now, so I am dependent on Amazon’s Look Inside function to refresh my memory).

There was certainly fiction that dealt with issues of colonialism in various ways, including discrimination, in the first half of the 20th century, and debates over imperialism were all around for those who were interested. Given the almost total absence of domestic political issues in the Georgian and Regency novels, I’ve always assumed Heyer wasn’t interested, beyond a general preference for conservative politics. That’s not the same thing as being unaware.

For what it’s worth, I’m the descendant of at least one cousin marriage in the US, and probably more pre-immigration (old English Catholic gentry; lots of wealth-concentrating marriage within a small social circle). 

I will confess that as a young’un, I mocked a friend who met her boyfriend at a family reunion, but…I mean, come on, the joke writes itself.

A side note re: Orczy- are there any actual Jews in her books? All I can remember is Percy in disguise, in which case we aren’t even talking about how she thought about Jewish people in 1903, we’re talking about how a late 18th century Englishman thought he should dress up to look Jewish, as imagined by an author in 1903, and the reactions of late 18th century French people to him, which is even less likely to corrolate with the author’s ideas in real life. Of course I don’t know much about the Baroness’s opinions outside of her fiction, or I could be forgeting an antisemetic portrayal of a character who actually is meant to be Jewish elsewhere, so maybe the Percy-in-disguise part isn’t really the reason her name often comes up in these discussions?

There’s no denying that most of her books were classist as all get out, though. I still reread them but I often have to stop and snark her on my LJ.

Much as I love Strong Poison, the basic message is that those who are “bohemians” (consciously left-wing artists, who condemn the prevailing attitudes toward class and sex) are sweetly naive and deluded at best, and horrible hypocrites (who more or less deserve to be murdered) at worst.

If Sayers was writing the same words today about hipsters, you’d be nodding in agreement with her. Harriet was a bohemian, and a ‘loose woman’ by the standards of the day, and she’s shown as having a very high and admirable moral character for *not* wanting to marry for status and respectability. You could say she was living the bohemian ideal in fact, living for her art, and not for a man or social expectations.

I think Sayers (who clearly admired the upperclass and thought they held their position at the top of society by right not might) was clear-eyed enough to know that with any ‘movement’, be it communism, bohemianism, surrealism, or pre-Raphelites, have their serious, thoughtful adherents who produce works and art of lasting value, and also the rather vacuous, thoughtless, ridiculous adherents invite mockery of themselves and their pretensions. I can support gay rights and still think Peter Tatchell is a wanker, and I can be a socialist when some left-wingers make me roll my eyes so hard I could generate electricity with them.

On her putting admiration of Hitler into a sympathetic character’s mouth, I think it’s important to realise that in the 1930’s, Hitler’s reported opinions about all kinds of things would have been seen as admirable by a good many people, just as the atrocious remarks of people like Michele Bachman have their admirers. If one doesn’t think too hard about things, and the consequences of the extreme sentiments have yet to be realised, then agreeing with sentiments like women shouldn’t be educated and so on might seem perfectly reasonable (and can we condemn our kindly Hitler loving porter when we have modern opinion writers blaming ‘liberals’, feminism, ‘political correctness gone mad’ and baby bearing lesbians for the downfall of western civilisation?) I saw Sayer as chronicling, not agreeing with her working class character.

The stereotypical, anti-Semitic portrayal of Jews in Sayers’ books is regrettable, though she does portray sympathetic Jewish characters too. Would I wish she hadn’t included the anti-Semetic characters? Yes. Do I think it reflects badly on her? Yes. Would I characterise her as anti-Semetic? Not on the evidence of her novels, but her blind spots are obvious and painful to the modern reader. I don’t think we should excuse her failings, but as the woman is long dead, we can hardly educate her past them now. All we can do when we hit them is educate *our* response, and be very clear this stuff wasn’t okay then, and isn’t okay, even if we have to accept that Sayers and Heyer and others sadly aren’t unusual.

Holy crap, Sarah you weren’t kidding about the tvtropes link. Like my SBTB addiction isn’t enough for you.  Also, a tuffet is a very fine place to be and I’ve loved cottage cheese since before I could spell it. 

“Before he could stop himself he found that he was replying to this. “Selina, who repeated this remark to me, is not fond of horses, however and she -” He broke off, seeing how absurd it was to argue on such a head.

I expect she will be, when she has lived in the same house with Miss Wraxton for a month or two,” said Sophy encouragingly.

Ouch! My mind automatically leaps to the worst case scenario that after living awhile with Miss Wraxton, unliked horses will seem good by comparison. Comedy genius.

At first I was sorry to be late in spotting this post but the lively debate in the comments section is making me rather glad to be late.  My personal hot button is misogyny and I find it particularly inexcusable when written by a woman. Goldhanger looks like classic weak characterization which occurs with even the most talented authors and I definitely consider Heyer to have been supremely talented.  No work, nor author behind the work,  is ever perfect and every character created cannot rise to the top but when characterization, weak or strong, is used as a platform within the fiction to spread personal prejudices it is offensive regardless of whether the writing occurs/occured in 1850, 1950, or 2050.  I haven’t read The Grand Sophy, so I can’t comment on whether the character of Goldhanger would rise to that level of intrusion by the author but the throw-away nature of his portrayal as showcased above is disturbing (why call the nose semitic).  I do remember the characterization of the pseudo Vicomte de Valmé in These Old Shades and found it, while in keeping with attitudes of the time in which the book was set, more lazy than purposeful on the part of the author. I also wonder if Leonie’s perceived childishness might have more to do with French stereotyping than an actual age issue. Leonie came across to me as volatile but not necessarily childish.  I wonder if people would see her as so young if not for Avon’s constant dominant behavior in referring to her as child, etc.  I’m fairly new to reading Heyer and my favorite to date is Devil’s Cub.  I have a weakness for a good romantic adventure, enjoyed Leonie and Avon more as the parents of a grown hellion than as the leads in their own book, and adored the portrayal of both Vidal and Mary. Devil’s Cub had more depth all around than These Old Shades with the obvious exception of the portrayal of Sophia, Mary’s sister.

The first cousin issue is a non-issue for me.  Now first cousins marrying first cousins of first cousins of first cousins raises genetic issues that might make for some interestingly peculiar family members two or three generations down the road.  This isn’t only an American issue but the relative modernity of American culture may have something to do with this bothering Americans in general more than it does readers from Britain and Europe.

The education/knowledge argument doesn’t hold up for me in any form as I’ve never found that prejudice and education are mutually exclusive. I am personally acquainted with more than one patronizing university-educated, should-know-better bigot with most of them being born after World War II.  When it comes to belief in racist stereotypes it isn’t always actual belief on the part of individuals as an unwillingness to rock the boat that contributes to a culture-wide acceptance of such beliefs and I think the more underground nature of racism, classism, etc. in the modern era should probably scare all of us.  Regardless of how Heyer was educated, I don’t think anyone could argue she was dumb, uneducated, or unable to form her own opinions.  I wonder if her bigotry and classism might have had more to do with inferiority issues within herself.  I see an author’s work being as much a product of the person as of the times in which she lived.  Beautiful things can come from inner turmoil but bad things can occur as well.

When it comes to the issue of the lack of character growth on the part of Sophy there is the thought to consider that Heyer didn’t bill herself as romance writer and that The Grand Sophy should probably be considered first and foremost a comedy and therefore the heroine’s journey was probably not Heyer’s main concern.  Heyer might have been a closet purple prosaist but I suspect publisher dictated trappings have been around almost as long as the printing press.

This has stoked my critical curiosity enough that I’m going to purchase The Grand Sophy along with quite a few other Heyers while they are on sale.  $1.88 at BooksOnBoard.  Sometimes late is great.

If Sayers was writing the same words today about hipsters, you’d be nodding in agreement with her.

I would be?  I seem to recall from other posts that you’re on the other side of the globe, but if you know New York City, I’ll just say that I’ve worked for the last decade in Williamsburg, and that a scary amount of my social life revolves around Bedford Ave.

I take your point (though I don’t know who Peter Tatchell is).  But one of the reasons I think Sayers is ultimately a better writer than Heyer is that while I disagree with many of her positions, her writing rarely falls into cliche.  (I disagree with her position on the death penalty, for example, but no one who’s read the end of Busman’s Honeymoon could think that she takes the stance lightly or thoughtlessly, or from an ill-concealed prurient glee at violence.)  Some of this (as AgTigress pointed out) may be because Heyer was writing comedies of manners, and Sayers was not (at least, not always).

But I brought up the portrait of bohemia in Sayers’ work (and I was actually thinking of Marjorie, who is seen as sympathetic but deluded, and unworthy of remaining Peter’s lover) to point out what cbackson said a lot more concisely upthread; there was NOT a “universal” consensus about anti-semitism (or racism, or classism) at the time that these authors were writing.  (Or indeed, now, as Ann points out.)  Even at the time that Heyer’s novels were set there was debate over what I’ll generally refer to as ethical issues about treatment of other people (although the debate was obviously framed in much different terms).  History is NOT a single forward march of “progress” and we delude ourselves if we think that our favorite authors were NOT clearly aligning themselves in one direction or another.  It doesn’t mean we can’t love these authors.  It does mean that we have to recognize that both they and their characters would be people who would be hard to have dinner with in real life, not least because they would not choose to eat with some of us…or would be overly gracious as befits aristocrats who are so completely free of petty racial prejudice against those less blessed in birth.

if you know New York City, I’ll just say that I’ve worked for the last decade in Williamsburg, and that a scary amount of my social life revolves around Bedford Ave.

I’m afraid that means nothing to me, sorry. When I said ‘you’ it was more a generic than a specific you. Every time I’ve seen hipsters mentioned, it’s in the same mocking manner that Sayers adopted towards certain bohemians. Since Sayers was kinder towards alternative lifestyles than G&S were in ‘Patience’, I couldn’t scan her as having an intractable disgust towards all Bohemians, just certain ridiculous specimens.

Peter Tatchell is an Australian gay activist who can also be a bit of a dickhead.

The rest of your comment is made of win.

Heyer is a long, long time love of mine.  I first read her when I was quite young and the various “isms” pervading her work went right over my head.  I fell in love with the dialogue, the plot hijinks, the pure delightful froth of the world she created.  Just as I read Gone With the Wind, cried for hours afterwards, and totally missed the really blatant racism in that book.  It took growing up to see the prejudice in those books.  And other books as well.

Though, I don’t know it’s right to say that the anti-semitism or the classism or the racism went over my head or that I missed it.  What I probably missed was that I was being presented with those attitudes as “norms”—at least inside the world of the books.  I think growing up with those norms influenced me in ways that I would prefer not to have been influenced.  I certainly have no intent to be disrespectful of any one person or group based on stereotypes, though I suspect that like many people, there are some stereotypes rattling around upstairs that I would prefer weren’t.  I think I’m trying to say that the presence of those stereotypes in the books we read matters.  I think it’s important to recognize them. 

What we do with that knowledge seems a personal choice, given the nature of the highly intimate relationship book lovers have with the world they hold in their hands.

Right after my father died I could barely sit through a movie that had a character with Alzheimer’s.  I found it flat out impossible when the disease was glossed over so that it seemed like the person was just a little “drifty” and forgetful.  I loved the history part of the Notebook but simply could not tolerate the present tense frame.  I could not accept the sentimental view provided in the movie.  Which is why the movie is not on my movie shelf.

I’m not saying that the presentation was offensive (in the way the portrait of the money lender in TGS clearly is), but simply that what we can or cannot tolerate in what we see or read is personal.  Visceral. 

I love reading books and I know that when I read books from previous times, I am going to find elements that I find problematic.  For any given work I either find a way to make my peace with that or I don’t.  Sometimes, as with Heyer most often, I make some mental nod to earlier time periods and keep reading.  Most of the time that works.  Of course, sometimes it doesn’t. 

I do expect more from someone writing today.  I don’t entirely let Heyer off the hook for her prejudice, but knowing how much more widely spread it was at the time and how much less culturally examined it was than it is now or has been for the last several decades, I am more able to wince and keep on reading. 

I totally understand when someone can’t do that.

Though it also makes me a little sad because I wish those elements weren’t in Heyer.  Totally selfishly I wish it, too, because I would enjoy her books more if I didn’t have to make allowances for attitudes that I really, really don’t like. 

That said, I don’t want to end on a bummer note about Georgette Heyer because I really do still love her.  I love the diversity of her characters and her plot lines.  She can have the coldly superior hero of These Old Shades, the sweetness of Freddie in Cotillion, the youthful hijinks of Friday’s Child, the irreverent hero of Black Sheep, the jokester competent soldier of The Unknown Ajax; the burned out rake of Venetia.  I can’t think of a single contemporary writer who has as broad a range in character types and plot lines and story “feel.”  I don’t know that anyone does dialogue better.  And there are some of her books in which the plotting is jus brilliant.

It was so exciting when I was first reading Heyer because whenever I held a new book in my hand, I just didn’t know what I was going to find inside: wit and humor, yes; romance, yes; but how it would play out?  A delight awaiting me. 

So, yes, a sensibility that is at times flawed.  I don’t blame anyone for not being able to get past those flaws, either in a single book or in her whole world.  But for me, she has provided many hours of wonder.  Her books have been a joy, a solace, an escape, a vacation.  And mostly, they still are.

Ann Somerville:

I can support gay rights and still think Peter Tatchell is a wanker,

Thank you for the first laugh I have got from this thread.  :-)  But it is an important point.

As someone whose greatest bugbear with contemporary Regency novels is how the characters show impeccable contemporary sensitivities on pre-marital sex, class, the value of industry, the way to treat servants etc, I have more time for Heyer’s portrayals than many other readers.

I am more likely to throw a book across a room because Mary Balogh makes everybody welcome (which I think is dishonest about the historical situation, thus writing out two hundred years of feminist and Civil Rights struggle) than Heyer’s caricature, for three reasons.
Firstly, I don’t think Goldhanger comes off as a worse person than many white, titled, Members of the House of Lords. 
Secondly, Heyer uses the debt to the moneylender as a motif in so many novels that she really needed to put one in—and to write the Jews out is also an act of erasure (I get crosser about texts blind to otherness than texts which are crass in their depiction of otherness).
Thirdly, I really can’t think of any way a girl of Sophie’s class could meet a ‘nice Jew’ in the world of the novel.  Jews who are today major movers in High Society (like the Rothschilds) are Continental families and bankers (only enobled in 1885), and D’Israeli (Disraeli’s father) was from a merchant family and a writer in 1815.  Sophie does meet a banker (scandalously), but a Jewish banker would be too much; and women in Heyer’s novels never get near artists; and Jews were excluded from Universities, Parliament, Almacks etc until the mid-19th century.

So, having to chose between no Jews and a bad Jew, I’d prefer to compromise on the side of including, even if not inclusively.

reached88—I have ranted for so long that surely I must have reached88 lines by now!

On a point made by others:  I do not believe that Heyer’s unpleasant caricature of Goldhanger necessarily means that she was anti-Semitic in real life.  She may have been, but that passage does not prove it.  It proves only that she disapproved of dishonest moneylenders, and in the period in which her story was set, moneylenders, honest or otherwise, usually were Jewish.

This just proves how widely spread antisemitic stereotppes are still today and even among educated people. I don’t know the exact figures but in the 18th century the Jewish population in Britain was less than 40,000 people. Most of those weren’t moneylenders as well as in Heyer’s time very few were. Most moneylenders were NOT Jewish, and the Jewish ones most likely were neither greedy, unclean or lewd. So when Heyer introduces such a characters, it really isn’t a realistic portrait but an antisemitic stereotype.

Thank you for the review. I had considered reading this book and I am now certain I wouldn’t enjoy it.

While I recognize that in some novels, similar racial stereotyping or slurs are dated examples of past bad attitudes, I cannot enjoy those books for the same reason.

Recently I read the Complete Sherlock Holmes and became agitated repeatedly that anytime there was a murder someone said “Oh there are gypsies in the neighborhood” as though their itinerant lifestyle was obviously the source of crime. And in none of those stories did the gypsies do a damn thing! It was just this awful assumption.

I would love to see some statistics.  I think that Rhea is right in saying

when Heyer introduces such a characters, it really isn’t a realistic portrait but an antisemitic stereotype

regardless of how many Jews were moneylenders.  My knowledge of history comes almost entirely from novels, and is in general not my strong suit.  I was under the impression that historically in many countries Jews were limited in the occupations they were allowed to legally pursue, and that moneylending was one of relatively few available to them.  And I had also thought that Jews were bound by some sort of religious law regarding interest, and thus were the moneylenders of choice, because they would have the best rates.  I also sort of have the impression that at various times in England possibly Christians were not allowed to charge interest at all, which meant that when they needed to borrow money they had to turn to Jews or Muslims.  I have no idea where I got these impressions, which is wholly typical of me, and they are probably untrue, which would also be typical.  I would love to know more.  Does anyone know what percentage of moneylenders were Jewish and what percentage of Jews were moneylenders?  England in the early 1800s would be most relevant to the discussion, of course, but now I’m curious in general.

@kkw - Ok, you probably didn’t want to get me started on this topic.  I don’t know much about English Jews, but I can sort out part of the money-lending thing:

In Medieval Europe, the Catholic Church condemned all interest bearing loans as “usury” which was (and is) a sin.  Since the Catholic Church was THE only available church in Western Europe, and since canon and civil law were very much intertwined, this led to an effective prohibition on professional money-lending by Christians in the Middle Ages.  Jews were permitted to make interest bearing loans, hence the prevalence of money-lenders who were Jewish.  (Christians did duck around the prohibition in a few ways, one of them being “dry exchanges” - that were essentially currency changes where the foreign currency was bought at one price, and sold back at another that had been pre-fixed, not unreasonable if you consider that communication prevented world currency markets from fluctuating at the speed that they presently do.  That is, however, a different story.  If you’re interested I’d recommend the sourcebook Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World by Lopez and Flanagan.)

So while it may have been true in some places in the Middle Ages that most money-lenders were Jews (the Genoan bankers in Italy, and the Fuggers in Austria, however, were not), it was never true that most Jews were money-lenders.  When Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492 a plurality (something like a third, if I recall correctly) listed a profession related to the textile industry, followed by nearly a quarter who were in a medical-related field.  (Iberian Jews actually had the right of being called “doctor” since universities in Toledo and Cordoba were open to them.  In the rest of Europe the universities were exclusively Christian, but the professions of “surgeon” and “apothecary” were not university trained, and can be lumped into “medicine-related.”)  After these two big groups of cloth and medicine came every other commercial activity, with money-lending somewhere down the list.

However, to make life a little more complicated, in addition to money-lending, Jews were also prominent (although in this case a minority) of tax-farmers, that is agents of the royal crown to collect taxes.  Your friendly local IRS agent is seldom popular, and if you know the portrayal of the Sheriff of Nottingham in several centuries of Robin Hood stories you can pretty much imagine the stories that grew up around Jews stealing the harvest from poor, starving peasants.  The reason Jews went into tax-farming was because in many European countries they were direct subjects of the monarch, and thus were considered both loyal and a counterweight to ambitious guilds or nobles (who might make the king do pesky things like grant privileges to a “free city” or sign a Magna Carta).  In many places Jewish ghettos functioned similarly to royal preserves.  To return to the Robin Hood metaphor: the king’s Jews were like the king’s deer; you weren’t allowed to hunt them without permission.  This relationship was almost inevitable when you consider that Jews were outside the traditional feudal system of vassalage, but were in many places too useful precisely as tax-farmers and money-lenders (i.e. those who do dirty work) to be completely dispensed with.  It provided the monarch with a source of loans (that could always be canceled by threat of withdrawing royal protection and encouraging the clergy to preach sufficiently anti-Jewish sermons to incite a riot), and it provided the Jewish community with at least nominal protection against the more rabidly anti-Jewish clergy and populace.

As a side note (which speaks to FairyKat’s comment about acts of erasure), I was in college before I read the first portrayal of a medieval Jewish moneylender in fiction that did not make me cringe; it was from the Poema del Cid, which begins with the hero cheerfully cheating a pair of Jews out of a rather large sum of money.  I loved it that they were there, they were money-lenders, and no one made any big deal about it.  The hero doesn’t trick them because he’s anti-Semitic, but because he needs the money, and they have it.  I also loved it that while the poem is ambiguous about whether he eventually pays them back, the later popular ballads have him paying them back and apologizing.

So that’s pretty much the Middle Ages.  It’s worth noting that Jews were expelled from England by Edward the Confessor in 1290, and only allowed to officially return by Oliver Cromwell in 1656.

The moneylender thing becomes a little sticky when we start talking about the Reformation.  Max Weber has famously linked Protestantism and the rise of capitalism, and while some of what he’s written is problematic, it is true that the Reformation clerics gently reinterpreted the scriptures to define “usury” as EXCESSIVE interest, as opposed to ANY INTEREST AT ALL.  Over time the Catholic Church gradually adopted this position as well, and current civil usury laws (mostly regarding credit card contracts and to some extent loan sharks) reflect this definition.  The ability of Christians to charge guilt-free interest obviously expanded the banking world tremendously.  (For stuff about the transformation of money-lending and the rise of capitalism, and how this related to Jewish stereotypes about money-lenders in the early modern period, see Simon Schama’s The Embarrassment of Riches which focuses on the Netherlands, but is probably generally applicable to Protestant Europe, and also quite well written.)

I have no idea what percentage of bankers were Jews by the early 19th century (which is the period you’re interested in), but according to Wikipedia Sir Moses Montefiore (1784-1885) was one of twelve “Jew brokers” licensed by the City of London to trade on the stock exchange there.  I would assume that the number of brokers in the City numbered in the hundreds, so if twelve were Jews that gives a general idea of percentages on the stock exchange.  Of course, that doesn’t say anything about smaller moneylenders.

I only knew Moses Montefiore as the patriarch of the family that gave its name to the Montefiore Medical Center in my home city (again, the connection between Jews and medicine), but the Wikipedia article about him is quite interesting.  He’s around the age of a number of Heyer characters, and he married in 1812, at the age of 28.  Heyer would probably consider him the prototype of the “Cit,” as he became quite active in civic life, becoming Sheriff of London 1837, receiving a knighthood in 1838, and a baronetcy in 1846.  He purchased an estate in Ramsgate in the 1830s, where he apparently retired to being a country gentleman.  My favorite part of the (**uncited, unsubstantiated) wikipedia entry is the following: “in 1873 a local newspaper mistakenly ran his obituary. “Thank God to have been able to hear of the rumour,” he wrote to the editor, “and to read an account of the same with my own eyes, without using spectacles.”“

In short, it’s quite possible that Moses Montefiore might have come into contact with some of Heyer’s characters, at least somewhat later in their lives.  However, it’s important to remember that he was one of a very tiny number of Jews in England at the time, and that the vast majority were probably quite poor.

Forgive the long essay.  I hope it was informative.  I’ll shut up now.

Wow, thank you, Rebecca! That was fascinating. Truly. :-)

Just to add a couple of points to Rebecca’s excellent comment: Remember that Heyer used contemporary sources like Gronow, Creevey, Walpole’s letters, etc. as if they were reporting unassailable facts. But these accounts quite naturally reflected the biases and imperfect information of the writers.

Consider the example of the “Jew” (John) King, who was a famous Georgian moneylender and to whom Heyer refers in at least one book (April Lady?). He was a fascinating, complex man who was politically active and well connected politically and socially. Heyer reduces him to just a Jewish moneylender, and she emphasizes his dishonesty but does not put it in the larger context of cheating, gambling aristocrats who did whatever they could to avoid paying their debts. Not exactly the honorable aristocratic behavior that she preferred to showcase.

On the Jewish population of Britain: I found a couple of sources that suggest it was 20,000-25,000.

Oops, I forgot to specify that the population figure is for 1800.

Thanks, Sunita!  (And to others for their kind words.)  I’ve been wasting a little time googling the topic, and one more footnote might be in order: The London Stock Exchange was first regulated in 1801, but opened in 1761 with a club of 150 “dealers” in stocks.  So assuming that it had expanded slightly by 1800, 200 brokers is a reasonable round number, which would make the 12 Jew Brokers approximately 0.06% of the stock exchange.  The population figure quoted by Sunita, and measured against the total population of the 1801 census, at just over 8 million people, would make Jews only about 0.003% of the general population.  So Jews were disproportionately over-represented in the financial industry compared to Christians (although by no stretch of the imagination could one say that “most” Jews were involved in financial services).  On the other hand since the general figures involve fractions of tenths of one percent, the idea of the “Jewish moneylender” probably owes more to stereotype than reality.

Just a quick note on Rebecca’s last comment: according to your figures, Jews represented 6%, not 0.06%, of the money brokers, and 0.3% of the general population - so quite considerably over-represented.  However, it certainly still leaves the vast majority of the financial industry being run by Christians.

Rebecca,

very interesting. Thanks for taking the time to type all that up.

One point though, I didn’t think the discussion was whether all Jews were money-lenders, but rather whether all money-lenders during that time frame in Britain were Jewish or not. Or in other words, if Heyer needed a money-lender villain for her story did he have to be Jewish (and I’m not addressing the way Goldhanger is described in detail here at all, just whether or not there were any money-lender that weren’t Jewish).  I’ve tried to do some research and have come up woefully empty with the resources at hand.

@Pensnest; Oops, lost a few decimal points there.  My face is red.

@GrowlyCub: I think part of the problem is the conflation of stockbrokers, banks, and moneylenders.  Over 90% of what we would now call the financial services industry might have been controlled by Christians, but I simply have no idea about small moneylenders, pawnbrokers, etc. who operated on the margins of society (and of course on a much more slender profit margin than the great houses).  So it’s pretty easy to trace the history of the great merchant banks, like Barings and Hope & Co. (Christians) or Rothschild (Jews), but your average money-lender is pretty invisible.  It’s the difference in modern New York between the Wall Street firms and multi-nationals like JP Morgan/Chase and the local check-cashing place in poorer neighborhoods where people live from paycheck to paycheck.  JP Morgan’s owners are easily found on the public record.  Who owns the check cashing place down the block?  I have no idea.  But I’ll take a bet that you’ll find more modern check cashing places or pawnbrokers owned by ethnic minorities (who live in the neighborhoods they serve) than you will find minority managers of the great Wall Street banks.  That might have held true in early 19th century London as well.  The kind of banker one met in a social setting, and who had the genteel corner office in the City might well have had a very different background from the moneylender in a dubious neighborhood.  (The rich man in the corner office, then as now, was much MORE likely to be playing fast and loose with the law than the “dodgy” character in the cubicle, but that’s a connection very few people make.)

I went off to do a bit of searching and came up with a couple of items that seemed relevant. In Todd M. Endelman’s The Jews of Georgian England, 1714-1830: Tradition and Change in a Liberal Society it says that:

The hoary association of Jews with moneylending - a source of social disharmony for centuries - also persisted in the Georgian period, although it appears to have been limited largely to lending to members of the aristocracy who lived beyond their means. Charles James Fox, a compulsive gambler and a consistent loser who was capable of losing £10,000 in a night, made good his losses by borrowing sums at high rates from Jewish moneylenders. George Walpole, the third Earl of Orford, was in debt to Jewish moneylenders. [...] According to [his uncle, Horace] Walpole, it was common for “youths of brilliant genius” who ran up large debts at cardplaying to borrow from Jews “at vast usury.” The two eldest sons of the first Lord Foley contracted gambling debts of of close to £220,000 before the death of their father and only met their obligations by borrowing from Jewish moneylenders. (212-213)

As for the persistence of antisemitism after 1945, since Heyer wrote detective fiction as well as historical fiction/romances, Malcolm J. Turnbull’s Victims or Villains: Jewish Images in Classic English Detective Fiction seems relevant. He states that “Occasional evocations of the Jew as moneylender/usurer continue to surface for more than a decade after 1945” (129). He does include some quotes from Heyer’s detective fiction but unfortunately those pages aren’t available via Google Books.

For anybody who wants Regencies featuring Jewish spies as a palate-cleanser, I recommend Nita Abrams’ Couriers series. And apparently they were suggested in a HABO from a few years back that might be useful.

Sunita shared—

Consider the example of the “Jew” (John) King, who was a famous Georgian moneylender and to whom Heyer refers in at least one book (April Lady?). He was a fascinating, complex man who was politically active and well connected politically and socially. Heyer reduces him to just a Jewish moneylender, and she emphasizes his dishonesty but does not put it in the larger context of cheating, gambling aristocrats who did whatever they could to avoid paying their debts. Not exactly the honorable aristocratic behavior that she preferred to showcase.

I didn’t remember the specifics of April Lady’s abortive trip to the moneylender (didn’t Felix stop it in time?) but the name King twigged something in my memory. Ah ha, Jessica visited a Mr. King in His Lordship’s Mistress—a bland and bankerly money lender who had no personality of any kind. Yes, he would have preferred Jessica defaulted but he was happy with the interest he made. And that’s all Joan Wolf wrote. He was needed for the plot I suppose? I do remember Jessica wanting to see a gambling den—since she worked so devilishly hard herself she wanted to see young men throw away everything on the roll of the dice.

I don’t think the use of an Jewish moneylender in Grand Sophy automatically gives the book a D. It is a trope heavily used in literature before World War II and a product of society during the period. I think that it’s important to understand that a lot of the prejudice is due to the way people were raised as children. It may be wrong today but it was acceptable then and to apply modern standards seems unjust. If you ‘fail’ Georgette Heyer based on her use of this trope, then you’d have to fail Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel, G.K. Chesterton and his Father Brown shorts, all the Golden Age of Mystery authors (who all wrote well into the 60s), and a lot of great writers of the 19th and 20th century. Even the interpretation the stereotype in The Merchant of Venice is relatively new to this century. Readers in the past certainly took it as a straight up criticism on “Jewish Moneylenders.” Anti-semiticism is a horrible thing, but to demonise people who may have had that sentiment is unfair as well. I think Faellie, Ann Somerville, and FairyKat say it best for me. Perhaps the focus should be on contemporary writers who discriminate against religions today as it is something that can be remedied. No case would I ever agree to editing/bowdlerising out books to remove traces of uncomfortable ideas. I think we should expect readers in the present and future to be more enlightened about them.

To be honest, I try to separate novels from their authors (I tend to hate knowing what they were like or how they supposedly intended the story to mean, I like to figure it out for myself) and this article and not the use of a bad trope has come close to ruining the book for me. Sometimes I hate how the need to be PC can kill the pure enjoyment of something.

I have not read this book, though I am quite fond of Heyer. I do find her books rather old-fashioned, and sometimes incorporating points of view or other things that I don’t care for.
I also don’t like bigotry when I encounter it in books. Any bigotry - not only this particular flavor. I find I can disregard it if the book is good enough otherwise, but there are certain authors whose books I just.do.not.read because of the bigotry and just plain wrong-headed attitudes they put into their books.
The Grand Sophy is an older book. It was written after WWII, yes, but the author was just about middle-aged when she wrote it, and I don’t think she would have changed her attitude overnight. It sounds like she needed a villain, and she took the easy way out and plugged in an easily identifiable stereotype for that particular character. That smacks of lazy writing to me, really, but the author might simply have been concentrating on those aspects of the book that she considered more important - or simply more fun to write.
Since I haven’t read the book, I don’t really know if this character is one that would have had me throwing the book across the room.
I might - but then again, I might have found that I enjoyed the other parts of the book too much.

Thanks so much to all of you who replied with details and book recommendations.  Exactly what I was looking for.  @Rebecca - I actually live in Williamsburg and I surely owe you a drink.

I tried reading this book on the recommendation of several people, and I couldn’t stand it.  Glad to know that others aren’t completely enamored of Heyer - I’ve tried more than one of her books, and find her very overrrated.

Wow, am I late in reacting to this thread, and I’m no where through reading all the comments, but I just needed to take a moment to call out authors Lynne Connolly and Anne Stuart.  Nice casual dismissal of racism guys!

I’m not going to do the classic internet flounce and swear upon my mother’s grave (God forbid something happen to her) that I’ll never support you or your publishers again, but seriously?  “Oh it was the 50s!” is a weak defense at best, and it’s disappointing to see it deployed by authors I respect.

Now that I’ve got that off my chest, I’ll go finish reading the rest of the discussion.

I disagree entirely about the meddling and the anti-Semitism.

I love this book because Sophy is a fixer. Although Charles does regain the upper hand at the end (which of course Heyer believes in), for most of the story, Sophy affects events, and very positively. I love seeing a young woman of shrewd understanding work to help make people happier.

As for the anti-Semitism, Heyer’s personal situation has been ably discussed above. Sophy is behaving in character, seeing the world in character, too. She tells the moneylender he’s a faker, and criticizes his filthy office, as I recall. She’s onto his “I’m the grasping Jew who has you in my clutches” routine, and she scoffs at it. That’s the whole point of the scene. She knows he’s not a very nice person but that he also exaggerates who he is and plays on his bogeyman reputation as “the other”—which she sees through. Greasy curls or not, he’s still a villain willing to capitalize on a young man’s folly and threaten a young lady’s physical safety.   

Any Jew reading this book has a right to take offense at it, of course, but most Jews I know (and I am married to one, so I know quite a few) do not waste a lot of angst over decades-old stereotyping. They’re more concerned about racism that still exists TODAY.

Similarly, I take offense at numerous books and movies WRITTEN TODAY that demean women. The Grand Sophy is a book that empowers women. To give it a D is to miss the most important aspect of the story.

They’re more concerned about racism that still exists TODAY.

Similarly, I take offense at numerous books and movies WRITTEN TODAY that demean women.

Lily, dear, you do realise that Derailing for Dummies is snark, not a real instruction manual, right?

And that you aren’t actually Jewish, or indeed know the feelings of every Jew, so you really shouldn’t be trying to lay any guilt down over what Jews feel about heinous stereotyping, no matter how old (and it’s still being used. Wake up and smell the anti-semitism.) YOu have a number of Jewish women explaining great detail here why they’re rightfully offended (as well as a number of Nice White Women explaining just as you have why they have no right to their experiences - really, it’s been a repulsive display of privilege.) Why not listen to them and not ust your tiny circle of friends - it’s improbable, I know, but you might learn something.

You say you take offense at books which demean women today. Well, Lily, I take offense at people who give nasty anti-Semetic stereotyping a pass because of a supposed pro-feminist viewpoint by the author. LIberal displays on one axis aren’t like Cilit Bam, you know. They don’t wash away the grime and smell of all the other horrible shit in a book.

You can admire this book for its good points, and still recognise the bad. It’s not all or nothing.

“Some of my best friends are Jewish,” she said with a straight face.

LIberal displays on one axis aren’t like Cilit Bam, you know.

I read Cilit Bam as Clit Barn…. somethings wrong with me…

@Ann - Ok, I just read “Derailing for Dummies” and am now seriously unsure whether to be laughing maniacally or crying.  That is some deep brilliance there.  Though deeply disturbing.

@LilyB - I like to think that any empathy (NOT of the derailing for dummies type, I hope!) I have for those who are marginalized today comes from my feelings about past stereotypes about Jews.  (Let’s be honest, in New York in the 21st century, I can’t really claim to be part of a marginalized group.)  I absolutely respect your lived experience.  But I wonder if you would feel comfortable reading the scene aloud to your husband?  Or to your mother-in-law or sisters-in-law?

Even if you graduate from a university, it looks like one’s education or exposure isn’t over. I majored in history, (primarily Jewish history during different periods, but not regency…) and it saddens me that people continue marginalize emotions others are feeling. I am honestly saddened that Jewish people were seen that way throughout history, and due to these circumstances and more are continuing to be stereotyped against.  (Especially Jewish women characters…)

Out of curiosity, Lily B, if you were a Jewish male and you picked up this book and saw this scene, what would your reaction be I wonder?

If you watched a movie or read a book that portrayed women shallowly (let’s say for example Louise de la Valliere,) you will be upset because Louise absolutely does NOTHING and she’s nothing but a helpless woman who lets herself be controlled by King Louis. (At least in Dumas’ portrayal…)

Being part of a heritage that’s been persecuted for two thousand if not more years, it isn’t pleasant to run into scenes where we are portrayed negatively because it feels like an attack on person as well as beliefs, and that is not a pleasant sensation.

I’m not trying to pick a fight or anything, but I’m simply stating my opinion. If you are positive your husband will not be offended, or anyone else, read them that scene and see their reactions. Even if they might not be offended, they might get sad because of the scene.

(My apologies if anything I said was offensive…)

Word: Normal82
I do not feel normal today, not at all…

@Robinjn… I have a friend who breeds Shelties; I know that close attention to genetic risks can produce eminently healthy dogs. BUT:  I also know people who love Collies who were disgusted with the narrow-skulled, needle-nosed specimens that were in fashion for awhile, and I’d also contend that English Bulldogs, many of whom are too weak in the hindquarters to breed unassisted and too narrow for many females to birth their own puppies without Cesarean, are proof that humans did those animals an injustice breeding them to look the way they do.  And I won’t get into the eye-socket difficulties of Pugs or hip dysplasia in larger breeds.  I’ve seen enough of the dog-show world, secondhand, to convince me that it’s as much politics as love of any breed—how is it that the same coterie of ‘important’ breeders and celebrity owners always manage to slide through the narrow registration window for Westminster?  I’ll stick with mutts.

@ LilyB..  I find Sophy a bit tiresome because of the assumption of superiority inherent in her ‘fixer’ attitude—she knows better than anyone else how they should be living their lives, but she also assumes the rules don’t apply to her—she’ll gallop in Hyde Park if she chooses.  And when she borrowed Charles’ young, untrained horse solely to tick him off, she was risking not only her own life, but the horse’s - and anyone who might have been injured if he’d got away from her.  Yeah, she was fun for the most part, but at times I could have slapped her.

@ almost everyone in re: Shylock… I’ve always seen that character as Shakespeare’s version of Jim in Huck Finn… “Do we not bleed?”  The way the part is played can make a big difference, but to me it seemed to exaggerate the stereotype in order to refute it.  And didn’t Sophy point out to Goldbanger that if he’d had a daughter, she would have tidied the place up?  Are we to bemoan the stereotype of men as slobs when left to their own devices?  (Unfair, I know; there is too much evidence to support that case.)

And, historians, correct me if I’m wrong, but a Jewish guy I once dated told me that many Jews got into finance and the learned professions because they were, in England, forbidden to own property.

I do think that we’re getting into touchy territory when we start seeing the suggestion that anything controversial should be avoided because it might “make someone sad.”  Not suggesting that anyone write without considering the effect on her readers, but I’m sure that self-righteous young church-ladies are upset at the portrayal of Eugenia. 

And I don’t think extortionate moneylenders are any less admirable than wealthy aristos who fret about their ‘debts of honor’ created by stupid overindulgence but think nothing of defrauding tradespeople who were trying to make a living.  Heyer’s characters who wallow in self-pity because their own bad habits have run them into trouble irritate the hell out of me, as does Heyer’s kid-glove treatment of some of them.  I wouldn’t have blamed Kit Fancot if he’d locked his lying, self-indulgent mother in the attic until he at least got her bills paid off.

Sophy acknowledges to her opponent in this scene that if the situation were different, she would be in a caring child-to-parent relationship him. That is acknowledging his humanity, not discriminating against him as a non-human or someone whose race she despises. She despises his behavior, and rightly so. This book does not deserve a D rating based on this scene.

For years I avoided reading any Jack London because he was reputed to be a racist. When I finally read Call of the Wild, I realized how foolish it was to count someone out based on other people’s hindsight criticism of him. None of us will look perfect to the people of a century in the future.

It would be a shame if someone missed this book by Heyer, or indeed, decided to give all her works a pass, based on this one scene. On the other hand, it’s probably a good thing that the scene has been held up to debate; people who feel especially sensitive to the portrayal of this moneylender certainly don’t need to be blindsided by it.

I don’t know the particulars of your bitter life experiences, but then neither do you know the particulars of mine. Please don’t assume a life of privilege or a history of inclusion in Western European society just because I am not a birth member of your specific marginalized group. There are plenty of marginalized groups to go around, and I’m in some of them. Let’s leave it at that.

Please don’t assume a life of privilege or a history of inclusion in Western European society just because I am not a birth member of your specific marginalized group.

I don’t care if you’re a black one-legged Muslim - you airily dismissed the concerns of a disprivileged group to which you don’t belong. You actually tried to belittle their concerns, and then hid behind the classic ‘Some of my best friends are X’, which immediately marks out your argument as specious.

You’re not offended by the portrayal of a Jewish character in this book. Whoopdedoo. What makes your opinion superior or relevant beyond those with lived experiences of anti-Semitism?

Every person (I think) commenting on this post is female - so we’re all automatically members of a disprivileged group. If you think that gives you or us any pass on bigoted, ignorant comments, or means we don’t have to give a shit about racism, anti-Semitism or any other ism, then you are wrong.

Let’s leave it at that.

You don’t get to control the responses to your comments or the parameters of the discussion either. I don’t want your life history, nor do I consider myself entitled to it, but if you’re going to throw it out there without further details as a defence to stupidity, don’t be surprised if that defence is mocked. Even if you *were* Jewish, you don’t get to invalidate the opinions of other Jews, just as the rampant anti-feminism of right-wing female politicians, doesn’t invalidate the views of women who are feminists.

As a woman, a reader and a Jew, I find Goldhanger irredeemably offensive. I am quite aware of the prejudices of 19th century writers, but even those writers raised in a culture of bigotry could sometimes find their way out. For example, Mark Twain, raised in a slave state, wrote one of the finest American novels, Huckleberry Finn, about a white boy who decides to help free a black slave. Yes, he’s called “Nigger Jim”, and yes, it was a perjorative even then. But it works as a brilliant device to continually reinforce to the reader that the time and place and culture of that book accepted that appellation as normative, descriptive and right. It reinforces the theme of entrenched racism, a racism so bone-deep even in Huck that he never questions whether the institution itself is flawed. Rather, he takes the whole matter on personal terms, and despite being a product of a culture that tells him that helping a slave escape will condemn them both to hell, decides to forfeit his soul anyway. Despite his inculcation in the values of the white owner class, he rejects them based on instinct and love, making a personal connection to Jim that goes beyond their predefined, stereotypical roles as white and black. It’s a masterwork of subtlety and characterization, that takes the notion of a stereotypical “nigger” and turns him into the emotional heart of a story.

Comes Georgette Heyer, also raised in an atmosphere of prejudice and misunderstanding, with an institutionalized perception of Jews as Other. Does she rise above the stereotypes fed her? Does she strive for any authenticity of voice, of character, of delineation? As noted, Heyer could take a two-sentence intrusion of a groom into a story and make it memorable and unique, could write a character in only a few strokes that took it above the mundane. So why, in this instance, did she repeat flat and clumsy stereotypes? Why did she abandon her normal propensity for writing acute, memorable, and DIFFERENT characters, characters that did NOT mirror the works of others? We will never know.

I will not presume to analyze a woman long dead, and I am always suspicious of efforts to tie a writer’s personality to any specific work. Writers can write about murder without being murderers, they can write about racism without being racists. My quarrel with Heyer is not that she wrote an anti-semitic passage, it is that she confused characterization with caricature. It was just plain bad writing. Even Shakespeare, steeped in the mindless anti-semitism of his time, owed enough to his art to make Shylock memorable for what was NOT part of the stereotype.

As for Dorothy Sayers, yes, she wrote some anti-semitic passages, and yes, Lord Peter is at times rather casually racist. But I always remember that one of Lord Peter’s enduring friends in the books is Freddy Arbuthnot, the very quintessence of the John Bull minor aristocrat. Freddy marries a Jewish woman and not only remains Lord Peter’s good friend, but plays a significant part in a couple of mysteries. His is a portrait of a sympathetic man allied to the Jewish community, a man who still moves in the same circles as Lord Peter, who is obviously happily married to his Other-ish wife. It’s not an ideal, but it is an honestly drawn, honestly portrayed character. I would expect nothing less from Sayers. And it throws into high relief the real problem with Goldhanger: not that he’s a stereotype, but that Heyers, in this instance, was not writing honestly.

My post on an Austen discussion board about Heyer started a discussion about disturbing passages/characters in general, and I just loved this response from another member:

“Don’t think you’re going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as any document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.”

He was talking about the banning of “communist” books, but I think it applies to book in general. Reading offensive bits - racist, sexist or whatever - even by a favorite author reminds us where we’ve been, how far we’ve come, and that ALL people, even writers, great and small, are human and capable of human frailty.

That said, sounding all noble and all, there are plenty of books and authors I hate with a resounding passion over some passage, plot, character or other that offends my sensibilities, and which I wouldn’t read or recommend. I guess Eisenhower had a wise point there at the end - if it offends YOUR sense of decency, don’t read it. That’s the only acceptable form of censorship.