The Convenient Marriage by Georgette Heyer – swash and swoon

All hail the queen of the Regency romance, whose glorious romps demand to be shared with new generations of readers

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I adored Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances when I was younger. My mother had tons of them and, starting with Regency Buck – instantly captivated by the beautiful Judith Taverner, she with the “decided air of resolution in the curve of her mouth” and the fabulous romance with her guardian, the Fifth Earl of Worth – I raced through them all. I’ve not read her for some time, but after a recent sojourn into the hugely enjoyable novels of Harriet Evans, into each of which Evans manages to shoehorn a Heyer reference, I picked up the novel which was my favourite in my teens, The Convenient Marriage, and have been in a reading bliss ever since.

It opens with despair in the respectable but poverty-stricken Winwood family: eldest daughter Lizzie, the Beauty, is about to be offered for by Lord Rule, but is promised to Edward Heron. The family need the money the marriage to Rule would bring: son Pelham has run up a fair few gambling debts (“the Fatal Tendency in us Winwoods”). Middle sister Charlotte isn’t interested – “The very notion of Matrimony is repugnant to me. I have long made up my mind to be a Prop to Mama” – and so Horatia, just 17 and with “nothing that declared her lineage except her nose”, courts scandal by setting out to Rule’s house to offer herself as a Sacrifice.

’D’you suppose she killed him, Pom?’

‘Might have,’ said Sir Roland judicially.

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