After reading The Grand Sophy, I decided I needed a second Heyer to more adequately think about such a prolific and long-writing author. It was hard enough to choose among her works for The Grand Sophy, as “favorite Georgette Heyer” lists generally seem to list half a dozen books. How to pick a second? I decided that, as nearly any of her books seems to be somebody’s favorite, I would take the undemocratic and unscientific route of choosing “first available” from the library. The Corinthian isn’t on many people’s top Heyer lists, but it is charming, and it is one of her early Regency romances.
Book details:
Title: The Corinthian
Author: Georgette Heyer
Original publication date: 1940
Setting time & place: Regency London & Somerset
He is… a wealthy 29 year old pressured by his female relations to marry a woman he doesn’t love and who doesn’t love him. Also a snappy dresser..
She is… a 17 year old pressured by female relations to marry a cousin she does not love. Also fleeing said marriage in men’s clothing.
Reasons to read this title: It’s known for its tight plotting.
My review of The Corinthian:
Is it a romance novel? Yes. After an improbable meeting (he’s drunk! she’s climbing out a window! let’s go on a road trip!) and further shenanigans, the story wraps up with a passionate kiss and assumption of marriage.
Is it a must read romance novel? As discussed above, there are so many Heyer romances to choose from. I am totally unqualified to tell you which ones are “required”.
What’s a Corinthian, you ask? Perhaps something to do with the Bible? Or columns–an upstanding man? No, apparently it’s a term for a snappy dresser. A metrosexual, if you will. Or won’t, because there’s no discussion of Corinthians in the story. Instead, we have a tale of a fashionable gentleman going about his predictable life, on the verge of marrying a suitable woman he does not love, when suddenly a lively young lady appears and hijinks ensue.
This is essentially what happens in The Grand Sophy, written a decade later. I’ve fallen off the habit of explicitly naming common tropes in the books I’ve been reading, but it seems to me that both of these Heyer stories are mainly concerned with the one I call “a choice between impractical passion or passionless practicality.”
Looking at The Corinthian, our hero, Sir Richard Wydham, is expected to marry a cold woman who makes it clear that she neither loves him nor expects him to love her. Instead, he is meant to continue the good breeding of their two families, and use his fortune to pay off the debts of her more feckless male relatives. Sounds like a great prospect, right? Sir Richard heads out of that conversation to drink heavily and when he meets the heroine, he’s more than ready to run off on adventure and never look back.
Heroine Penelope “Pen” Creed, an heiress in her own right, is an orphan (a not uncommon affliction for the romance heroine, I note) raised by an aunt. Said aunt, in addition to being generally overbearing, would like Pen to marry her cousin and keep the money in the family. Seventeen year old Pen figures she’d rather climb out a window and escape to Somerset, where there’s a childhood friend she had a marriage pact with at age 12. Naturally, by the time she and Sir Richard catch up with the childhood friend, it’s quite clear that he’s not the match for Pen, but Sir Richard is.
Casting our minds back to The Grand Sophy we had a similar situation: Charles Rivenhall was on track to marry a woman who would have made a proper but loveless match and Sophy mucked all that up. Contrast, however, one of the side heroines in The Grand Sophy, Charles’s younger sister Cecilia, who spends most of the book in the throes of impractical passion with poet Augustus Fawnhope before opting for the more practical Lord Charlbury. Perhaps, after ten years, Heyer was ready to subvert the tropes–or she was drawing the contrast between the young and rather feckless Fawnhope and the more mature Charlbury.
t’s certainly an old and popular trope, though. Jane Eyre goes back to Rochester despite the very practical option of St. John. It would be practical for Elizabeth Bennet to take Mr. Collins’ offer, or for Lucy Honeychurch to follow through on her engagement to Cecil Vyse. But romance is not about choosing practical: it’s about choosing impractical and finding a way for life to work around that choice. It’s about following your heart, not following the expected path laid out by society and/or your family. In The Corinthian, both hero and heroine throw over the practical but passionless marriage prospects for adventure, and find joy, if not passion, in the impractical.
Maybe it all comes down to the second part of the RWA defintion of romance:
An Emotionally Satisfying and Optimistic Ending: In a romance, the lovers who risk and struggle for each other and their relationship are rewarded with emotional justice and unconditional love.
The characters have to choose the impractical passion in order for the story to be emotionally satisfying, and the author has to find a way to give an optimistic ending to the consequences of that choice.
Anyway, I don’t think anyone was questioning whether or not Heyer’s stories fit the usual definitions of romance, but I am here to think about what it all means! Here’s other romance tropes or plot commonalities I noted in The Corinthian.
- He’s not ready to marry… until he meets her. (Sir Richard is eminently eligible, but he’s never met a woman who interested him.)
- He is so rich. So incredibly rich. (Part of his eminent eligibility.)
- The Marriage Minded Mama (Sir Richard’s mother, and sister, are pressuring him to marry in the opening scene.)
- May/December Romance (Sir Richard is twelve years older than Pen, which seems like a large gap when the younger partner is seventeen.)
- Bodyguard romance (Sir Richard initially joins Pen on the stage coach because she’s really quite young and he is honorable enough that he doesn’t want her to get in trouble. He protects her from thieves as well as from her family.)
- Road trip (The majority of the story they’re on the way to Somerset and looking for Pen’s childhood friend.)
- Orphan heroine (Perhaps this makes a story simpler to write, but these days I worry about heroines who have no relationships except that they forge with the hero.)
There are obviously a great many more Heyer stories to read, even without trying to read her mysteries or contemporary romances. If I was aiming to write Regencies, I would read a couple more. I’m writing in Gilded Age America, however, so I’m jumping up to the succeeding generation of Regency writers for my next syllabus read. I’m not entirely done with Heyer though: I’m also reading Jennifer Kloester’s Heyer biography, and I’ll share some thoughts about that before getting into Judith McNaught’s Whitney, My Love.
