wabi wabi

If there is one thing I love to do, it’s to read.

In bed.

Preferably with a cat snuggled at my feet.

I know. I win at being cool.

Georgette Heyer is one of my favourite authors to read: one of the unsung heroes of British genre fiction. She was an amazingly prolific writer, penning more than fifty novels between the early 1920s and 1970s.

Most of her novels were historical (Regency era) thriller/romances, although she also wrote detective stories. A few weeks ago, I discovered a glut of her novels in my aunt’s bookcase that I’d never read before, which secretly thrilled me. I have been working my way through the backlog, and am onto my fourth unread novel in the space of a fortnight. (This could be why the German translation I’m supposed to be tackling has stalled in progress.)

Many of Heyer’s novels are still in print today and can be bought with shiny new covers, but I love the vintage paperbacks the best.

The only hazard to the $2.00 thrift-shop purchase is that the books sometimes fall apart in your hands when you’re reading them.

Somehow, however, it just feels better to read Heyer from a browned, dog-eared page.

I learn so much from reading these novels: about the English language, about history, and about Regency culture. For example, I now know that one British pound in 1800 is equivalent to approximately 32 British pounds in 2005. Or that orgeat was a popular drink in gaming clubs made from sugar syrup, barley, and orange blossom water.

Society functioned wholly on a rigid class system. If you were a woman, you had better hope that you possessed a pretty countenance (not to mention a “nicely turned ankle”) in order to secure a husband in case your position of birth was not impressive. Only if you had significant wealth could you afford to marry for love, and even then you had to be careful not to fall prey to fortune hunters. Of course, you could always elect to marry another person of great fortune and amass your wealth into something stupendous.

Money ruled. The upper classes existed to partake of leisure when they weren’t managing their vast estates — a task often charged to an agent anyway. Men played cards, went hunting, shot game, and strolled about wearing skin-tight pantaloons. Women… arranged flowers? Learnt to play the piano?

Both men and women really suffered for fashion. Women continued to wear makeup containing lead and mercury long after they learnt of the dire consequences to their health. It was unseemly for them to wear heavy shawls or warm clothing even in the midst of the colder months, so they had to make do with light muslins and silk, often contracting colds and influenza. The wealthy ate a huge quantity of cold cuts, cakes, and bread, drinking sweet wine at breakfast and tea before bed.

The whole lifestyle boggles my mind, especially the right to behave like a jackass to anybody of a lower class because kindness was seen as weakness in the nobility.

I read these novels voraciously because I simply adore the antiquated Britishness of the whole affair: the prose, the culture, the architecture, the gardens, the scenery. I love the flouncy, affectionately drawn characters, the sharp (unlikely) dialogue, and appreciate the enormity of the research that the author must have undertaken to achieve such authenticity in her work.

Heyer died in 1974 after suffering several strokes. She also had lung cancer — hardly surprising when you consider that she smoked more than fifty cork-tipped cigarettes a day.

But every writer has a vice, don’t they?