Georgette Heyer is one of my favourite historical romance writers (if not the favourite), because she writes with such warmth, humour and understanding of what it is to be human. She is often known and recommended as Jane Austen with romance/ a poorer Jane Austen - and that was actually how I got to discover Georgette Heyer and how I introduced her to friends. But, the more I have read her novels, the more I find this a misnomer... because Georgette Heyer is I daresay, an original in her own right, she never repeats herself in any of her novels, and her gift for re-invention and the playing of tropes gives me real pleasure. I always feel, just before I open her novel, that I am going to have the most fun reading it, that I will never be dissatisfied (even when I have my favourites). That, as a reader, is often all I can ask from a writer.
I was particularly moved by A Civil Contract and when it ended, I felt slightly out of breath, and smiled to myself, that was really beautiful. Roughly, the main character, Adam, returns from the war to inherit the title of Viscount Lynton from his just deceased father and finds his family "on the brink of ruin and the broad acres of his ancestral home mortgaged to the hilt". Thus, he cannot marry his first love, a beautiful blond romantic creation called Julia. Adam becomes engaged and subsequently married to "plain ol Jenny", the daughter of one of the richest man in the City, who wants to make a great social match for his daughter.
A Civil Contract is simultaneously absorbing and frustrating - because you know this story in your heart, titled handsome man marries the plainer but more practical and wiser girl (who has always loved him and can take care of all his needs) while having already given his heart to a beautiful princess of a blonde (who loves herself more than him, never really loved him but only the person she imagined him to be, and could scarcely survive with her golden spoon in her mouth). You want it to turn out the way you envisioned satisfyingly - and it does pan out satisfyingly but never in the way you want it. And somehow, that feels the most true to life, gaining that happiness in the end, but not exactly how you envisioned it.
Now, don't read the quote below if you don't want to know the ending:
A little pang smote her; she wanted to ask him: 'Do you love me as much as you loved her?' She was too inarticulate to be able to utter the words; and in a minute, knew that it would be foolish to do so. Searching his eyes, she saw warmth in them, and tenderness, but not the ardent flame that had once kindled them when he had looked at Julia. She hid her face in his shoulder, thinking that she too had an impractical dream. But she had always known that she was too commonplace and matter-of-fact to inspire him with the passionate adoration that he had felt for Julia. Probably Adam would always carry Julia in some corner of his heart. She had been tiresome today, putting him out of love with her; but Jenny did not think that this revulsion would last. Julia stood for his youth, and the high hopes he had cherished; and although he might no longer yearn to possess her she would remain nostalgically dear to him while life endured.
Yet, after all, Jenny thought that she had been granted more than she had hoped for when she had married him. He did love her: differently, but perhaps more enduringly; and he had grown to depend on her. She thought that they would have many years of quiet content: never reaching the heights, but living together in comfort and deepening friendship. Well, you can't have it both ways, she thought, and I couldn't live in alt all the time, so I daresay I'm better off as things are.
... She thought, and was comforted, that though she was not the wife of his dreams, it was her, not with Julia, that he shared life's little, foolish jokes.
Dear Husband, I am grateful to be both your Julia and Jenny. Which do you see in me at any one time? We are always changing, aren't we? But let's learn to always share in life's little jokes. After all, it would be nice as well, to be yours forever.
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