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Title: The Grand Sophy
Author: Georgette Heyer
Publication Info: Sourcebooks 1950 / 2009
ISBN: 9781402218941
Genre: Regency
This is a difficult book to review. On one hand, up until a specific point, I liked it. On the other hand, it turned offensive to the point of horror, demonstrating not only a repulsive prejudice but a use of lame stereotypical stock characters that detracted from the strengths of the novel. In the end, my enjoyment was dissolved by my own bitter disappointment.
Until that point of 0_o, I was loving this book.
Sophy is the only daughter of a diplomat, and has been following him around war-busy Europe. Now that her father has been assigned to South America, Sophy is to live with her aunt, Lady Ombersley, who will help Sophy find a husband. But Sophy’s father’s description of her is not at all the reality, and while most of Lady Ombersley’s family thinks Sophie is wonderful, her son, Charles Rivenhall, who has taken over management of the family’s finances and is as a result somewhat cranky in his responsibility, thinks Sophy is more trouble than she’s worth – and his fiancee dislikes Sophy, too.
Sophy strikes me as something of an original manic pixie dream girl, except for the diminutive tone of “pixie” because Sophy is very tall. She’s unconventionally attractive, memorable, energetic, irrepressible, and for God’s sake she comes with a small dog, a parrot, and a monkey. She’s got schemes. Plots! Plans! An almost diabolically ruthless intention to better the lives of everyone around her!
Of course, if you look up the book on TVTropes, Sophy’s listed as a “Chessmaster,” which she is, indubitably. She’s like a Manic Tall-Ass Chessmaster Dream Girl. She knows best, so stay out of her way.
(NB: If you follow the link to TV Tropes, I am not responsible for the approximate 4.5 hours of productive time you will lose. K?)
Sophy’s a bit like the movie version of Mary Poppins, with the vaguely sinister but well meaning and caring determination to making everyone all better, plus resolving every romantic pairing possible, including her father, who would be better off un-paired.
So what were the parts that I liked?
I loved the dialogue. I can’t even measure my giddy enjoyment of any scene in which Charles and Sophy debate, argue, attempt a civil discussion, and end up having a marvelously entertaining row.
I also loved the unintentional comedy from characters Sophy’s cousin Cecilia, and her aunt, Lady Ombersley. The idea that “no one can deny that nothing could be more ill-timed than Charlbury’s mumps” made me giggle for hours.
Sophy is a source of much consternation, with her determination to be literally and narratively in the driver’s seat. In one scene, Charles is discussing Sophy with his truly revolting fiancee, Eugenia Wraxton, after Sophy demonstrated to Charles’ horror that she is quite skilled at managing a team of horses. Miss Wraxton is most displeased for a multitude of reasons, from her desire for everyone to be miserable to her dislike of Sophy for taking Charles’ attention from where it ought to be (on Eugenia, of course):
“I am sure that it is not wonderful that she should have. To drive a gentleman’s horses without his leave shows a want of conduct that is above the line of pleasing. Why, even I have never even requested you to let me take the reins!”
He looked amused. “My dear Eugenia, I hope you never will, for I shall certainly refuse such a request! You could never hold my horses.”
ORLY?
But this is my favorite scene, because Sophy is so hilariously awful about the awful Miss Wraxton, and everyone can see (including the reader) how bad she really is, except for Charles, her fiance.
“Since you have brought up Miss Wraxton’s name, I shall be much obliged to you, cousin, if you will refrain from telling my sisters that she has a face like a horse!”
“But, Charles, no blame attaches to Miss Wraxton! She cannot help it, and I assure you, I have always pointed out to your sisters!”
“I consider Miss Wraxton’s countenance particularly well-bred!”
“Yes, indeed, but you have quote misunderstood the matter! I meant a particularly well-bred horse!”
“You meant, as I am perfectly aware, to belittle Miss Wraxton!”
“No, no! I am very fond of horses!” Sophy said earnestly.
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.
The best parts of this book are the comedy, both in the dialogue and in the mad cap collective happy ever after-ness of the ending, which, much like a Shakespearean comedy, ties up every lose end so the reader is secure that every last person shall go on marvelously. Just don’t think about it all too hard or you’ll see holes. Big enough to ride a horse through.
The characters were mirrored in a way that I enjoyed as well. There’s an amazing similarity between Eugenia and Sophy. Both are interfering busybodies, and both overstep their social boundaries on a continual basis. But the reader is invited to cheer for Sophy and loathe Eugenia because Sophy wants people to have what they want, and to be happy. Eugenia, meanwhile, would prefer everyone were miserable and perhaps even without meaning to do so, makes everyone around her unhappy.
As Sophy says of Eugenia’s engagement to Charles: “She felt it a pity that so promising a young man should be cast away on one who would make it her business to encourage all the more disagreeable features of his character.”
So what didn’t I like? GEE CAN YOU GUESS?!
I wasn’t thrilled with the abrupt happy ending, the sudden turnabout for Charles and the lack of not-fighting scenes for Charles and Sophy. And as Sunita pointed out via Twitter, Sophy doesn’t change or grow or evolve. She gets her way, and everyone around her is probably better off for her involvement, and they’re all happy, but Sophy doesn’t develop. She achieves through her own machinations, which, while entertaining, was not as satisfying as having her develop or grow as a character.
But what really soured this book for me was the anti-Semitism.
HOLY GODDAM HELL WAS THERE EVER ANTI-SEMITISM.
I got a warning, when Hubert, Charles’ not-doing-so-well brother says, describing his financial predicament to Sophy, “Faced with large debts of honour, already in hot water with his formidable brother for far smaller debts, what could he do but jump into the river, or go to the Jews?”
Jewish moneylenders. Oh, boy. So then Sophy takes it upon herself to go confront said Jewish moneylender. And then the whole book went to hell.
…the door was slowly opened to reveal a thin, swarthy individual, with long greasy curls, a semitic nose, and an ingratiating leer…. His hooded eyes rapidly took in every detail of Sophy’s appearance.
…
Mr Goldhanger had the oddest feeling that the world had begun to revolve in reverse. For years he had taken care never to get into any situation he was unable to command, and his visitors were more in the habit of pleasing with him than of locking the door and ordering him to dust the furniture…. The instinct of his race made him prefer, whenever possible, to maintain a manner of the utmost urbanity, so he now smiled, and bowed, and said that my lady was welcome to do what she pleased in his humble abode.
GOLDHANGER? With a “semitic nose” and the “instinct of his RACE?” Really?! That’s the BEST HEYER could come up with?! A stock character embodying every possible negative stereotype of Jewish people? It was so badly done it was multiply offensive. Not only was I offended personally as, you know, a Jewish person, but I was more offended as a reader as well because IT WAS SO BADLY DONE.
Hamfisted, clumsy characterization, over-the-top villainy, AND EXTRA BONUS BIGOTRY on the side.
As Sunita wrote recently, knowing the depth of Heyer’s own anti-Semitism and bigotry makes it a bit more difficult to savor her books. I’m not sure I’ll be picking up a Heyer any time soon, even though I have yet to read Venetia and Cotillion, and both have been recommended most highly. (NB: Since writing this review, I read Venetia; review forthcoming!)
In the end, though, in order to move past my reaction, I started mentally substituting “Goldmember” for “Goldhanger” whenever I read his name, which made it much easier to take.
Otherwise, my final impression is one of disappointment. Deep, bitter, offensive disappointment.
And thus I’m struggling with how to assign the grade. Even as I fill in all the fields, and code everything, I’m still hopping from grade to grade in my mind. I liked some of the characters, I loved the dialogue, I enjoyed the fast-moving yet flimsy structure that pulled everyone together into a suitable finale and the plot manipulations (aka Sophy manipulations) that caused them all to arrive at their suitable ending.
I abhor the wooden, stereotypical villain, his nearly meaningless role and the unnecessary bigotry and anti-Semitism. It was pedantic and poorly done, and while I’m now unhappily acquainted with Heyer’s own anti-Semitism, I’m still baffled by the nearly elementary and frankly stupid use of the character. I very rarely presume to know what the author was thinking while writing, but in this case, the insertion of stock caricature is so disturbing, it’s as if Heyer said, “Hmm. I need a really evil guy for the heroine to vanquish with her charm and some stuff concealed in her muff! And to make him really, really evil, in case you missed the evil, nefarious, greasy, dishonest, cheating and greedy parts of his character, let me make sure you don’t miss it by making him JEWISH!”
(Also: no, not that muff. Sorry.)
So, frankly, I can’t praise this book any more than I already have. The parts of dialogue I so adored are not nearly enough for me to overcome what I found so repulsive. Without Goldmember, I’d have probably graded this book at about a C+/B-. The story was entertaining but I didn’t feel any real empathy for Sophy the way I would for a heroine who grows, learns and evolves in the story. I was initially wonderfully entertained, but with the major flaw highlighting all the other smaller flaws, I cannot recommend this book any more than I’d recommend buying fruit that was rotten inside.
This book is available from Amazon | Kindle | BN & nook | WORD Brooklyn | AllRomance | BookDepository
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
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
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 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.
Nope – that was one of the things I liked about her. She was as meddlesome as Eugenia, but she genuinely wanted people to be happy, and to be with people who made them happy (as opposed to Eugenia, who liked it when everyone was miserable, dare I say, like her). She wasn’t unkind.
I just wish she’d grown or changed – but I think she was pretty much the same at the end as she is when she arrives at the house.
Also – I had NO IDEA that quilted stuffed seat covers were tuffets. I thought they were some kind of giant beanbag chair, only with more structure.
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.
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.
Can’t breathe…. laughing too hard.
@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. 😉
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.