Caroline is Writing

a blog by a writer attempting to live the literary good life on the internet

02 Feb 2026 8 min read Permalink

What I Read in January 2026

Crime, fantasy, short fiction, sheep.

I thought I would end up reading less. When I abolished my annual reading target — in response to the fact that in 2025 I read 121 books but felt frustrated about it — I did so in the expectation that I would not read as many books. Without the promise of that accomplished glow every time I marked a book "read" on the Storygraph, moving one digit closer to my goal, I assumed that I would end up taking things more slowly. I liked that idea: being more deliberate and considered, rather than reading at a breathless pace because there's a finishing line to reach. I predicted that I might finish three, perhaps four books this month.

It didn't turn out that way. I read nine books in January. I only averaged ten a month last year, when I thought I was reading too much too quickly (in ebook form especially). But I didn't feel like I was rushing from one to the other, perhaps in part because a couple of these were titles that I had started at some point last year and then put down, either because something more urgent came up (the perils of having a podcast about books) or because the book seemed too long/slow to keep me on pace for my end-of-year goal. I felt at liberty to pick them back up again now, which I think shows the lack of expectation is having the intended effect so far.

So what did I read? Keep going for details of:

three classic crime novels
two loosely-connected works of historical fiction
a contemporary Regency romance
a collection of literary fiction short stories
a fantasy adventure audiobook
and a non-fiction coffee table book about sheep

I was able to take a slightly slower start to the year with my detective fiction podcast, Shedunnit, because I recorded January's episodes before breaking for Christmas. The three crime novels I read this month, therefore, were all looking ahead to future projects (as opposed to the frantic overnight book-cramming I'm sometimes doing before recording dates).

Jumping Jenny by Anthony Berkeley from 1933 is an unpleasant but deeply fascinating novel that I'll be talking more about in a history-focused episode towards the end of February. It focuses on Berkeley's regular amateur sleuth, crime writer Roger Sheringham, at a country house fancy dress party where a woman ends up hanged on a gibbet that was meant to be part of the decorations. Up to this point, the setup could have been conceived by any 1930s crime writer. Only Berkeley would have thought to make Sheringham a deliberate accessory after the fact, in the sense that he tries to "clean up" the scene to protect a friend, and then spends the rest of the novel trying to evade the police's efforts to get at the truth. It's a really compelling formal experiment that merges the "howdunnit" with the "whodunnit" and, although not exactly comfortable reading, I would recommend it if you're interested in crime fiction innovation.

Curiosity Killed the Cat by Joan Cockin is the Shedunnit Book Club's chosen book for February, and podcast members will shortly be able to hear my thoughts about it at length in a special bonus episode (it comes out on 11th February, I believe). This is a post-WW2 novel, set in a Cotswolds village that was overtaken by an evacuated government department during the war which then didn't leave in 1945. It's now 1949 and the tension between locals and incomers is riding high. I found the setting and period details of this book more interesting than the plot, which wasn't especially exciting.

The Sanfield Scandal by Richard Keverne was a book that I knew nothing at all about before I started reading — which doesn't happen very often for me anymore. This is the value of the Green Penguin Book Club series that I do on Shedunnit: it makes me read books that I would never otherwise have encountered. They were famous enough to be included by Penguin ninety-odd years ago, but their fame has not lasted. I enjoyed reading this gentle, Famous Five-esque thriller (even though Blyton had not started that series when this book was published in 1929). I liked it in large part because its central castle reminded me of a) Orford Castle, where I spent many happy hours as a child on family sailing holidays b) the abbey in the Abbey series. The full episode about this book will be coming out in March.

My project for 2026 of reading my way through Georgette Heyer's historical fiction has got off to a good start. The books of hers that I read in January were Devil's Cub and Regency Buck, as I indulged my interest in a particular character (Devil/Satanas from The Black Moth/These Old Shades) rather than forcing myself to read in strict publishing order. I wanted to follow him and his family through their next books and didn't worry much that I had skipped the rest of the 1920s. I will go back and read the books that I've skipped, when I feel like it. I'm trying to be completist but not rigid about this.

I liked Devil's Cub a lot — my review of that book is available to read here — and Regency Buck not as much. So far I'm finding that reading even a mid Heyer title is an enjoyable way to pass the time. I've really enjoyed chatting with other Heyer readers in the comments and in my inbox. The welcome I've had from long-time fans for these books has really validated my decision to immerse myself in them properly. You can find all my Heyer posts here, and the one about Regency Buck is here. If you'd like to receive those as email newsletters, adjust your settings here to do so.

A Gentleman's Offer by Emma Orchard is a Regency romance novel published in 2025 that nonetheless is very connected to the work of Georgette Heyer. The author identifies herself as a Heyer fan and talks about how she got started publishing Heyer fanfiction during the first Covid lockdowns before moving on to her own original fiction. I'm coming to realise that all Regency romance exists in the shadow of Georgette Heyer, so it was nice to see that acknowledged and celebrated rather than left unspoken.

The plot of this book is more ridiculous and improbable than anything I've encountered in a Heyer novel so far: one half of a pair of twins absconds after her engagement to a famously eligible bachelor, her sister stands in for her, hijinks ensue. Of course, the other sister and the bachelor form a real attachment while they are keeping up the deception. Neither the characters nor the writing was especially memorable, although I had a nice time while I was reading it and would read more by this author in future.

The Little Black Book of Stories by A.S. Byatt is one of the two books that I picked up again this month after a long pause. I started reading it on 22nd December 2024 and then put it aside because this dark-tinged, abstract collection of longer short stories was going to require more attention and literary appreciation than I had available at the time. I restarted it this month after making my plan to read only short stories at bed time to stop myself staying up too late reading "just one more chapter" of a novel. This perhaps wasn't the best book to start that habit with, because these are 50-75 page short stories and I sometimes took several evenings to finish one. They aren't very plot-driven, though, which allowed me to stay on track.

The five stories in this book all deal with the interaction of the mundane and the fantastical. "The Thing in the Woods" is about two women who, while WW2 evacuees at a country house, saw a little girl get eaten by said "thing", and then meet each other again in late middle age when they both return to the scene of the trauma to get some answers. "Body Art" is written from the point of view of a lapsed Catholic obstetrician who thinks he has left his hangups about abortion behind him with his faith, until the question becomes personal and he realises he isn't as liberal as he thought. I felt quite frustrated while reading this one and thought I didn't like it. In thinking about it since, though, I've decided it's a mark of the story's quality that it got me so riled up. "A Stone Woman" was my favourite in the collection. It follows a lexicographer as she begins to turn to stone — all kinds of stone, it's a beautiful, fascinating process — and goes on a trip to Iceland to explore the mythology there. "Raw Material" absolutely nails the awkwardness of trying to teach creative writing but I didn't feel like it really earned its ending. And "Pink Ribbon", a story about a man caring for his wife with dementia while having night-time encounters with a younger healthy version of her, was my least favourite, as I feel like it's an idea I've read more fully-realised examples of elsewhere. Altogether, this book provided me with a thought-provoking and satisfying introduction back into reading literary fiction. I did, however, agree with this reviewer who said that Byatt was a little too fond of including long lists in her stories.

The other book I restarted after a long pause was the audiobook of Brigands & Breadknives by Travis Baldree. I've enjoyed the two other instalments in Baldree's cosy fantasy adventure series, slightly prefering Bookshops & Bonedust to the more famous Legends & Lattes. I started this third book back in November and then gave up, not because it was bad, but because I was struggling to focus because of overwork and health issues.

When I started again from the beginning this month, I was delighted to find that Baldree's strengths as a narrator (recording audiobooks is his day job) were just as great as I remembered. At one point in this story he manages to voice quick-paced dialogue between about five different characters at the same time, two of which are talking swords. It's very impressive, the more so because I didn't even notice the complication of the scene until the situation recurred quite far on in the book. I was also impressed that he eschewed the template he had followed in Legends & Lattes — character starts a business, the story follows them as it progresses — for something more complicated. A character does renovate and open a shop at the start of Brigands & Breadknives... only to realise in the first few chapters that she hates running said shop. She runs away from her life and does something else instead.

I began the year with The Wonder of Wool by Justine Lee and Jess Morency, which was a Christmas gift from my husband. This book is partly a history of the British wool industry and a guide to historic breeds, and partly a selection of knitting patterns designed to showcase the qualities of rarer wools. I read it in a day, some of which passed in a beautiful daydream about all the beautiful garments I would make if I didn't also have, you know, a job. A great gift for the knitter in your life who has strong opinions about natural fibres.

That was my reading for January: nine books, which show some progress towards my goal of reading a greater variety of genre and form. What I didn't manage to do was publish mini blog reviews of the books as I finished them — although I did manage a couple and enjoyed doing it! — so I'll re-apply myself to that effort in February.

Filed under: Blog, Reading Updates

27 Jan 2026 5 min read Permalink

The Invisible Exoskeleton

In my teens, I spent a lot of time playing an interactive fiction game called Hamlet: The Text Adventure. I enjoyed the snarky little additions the creator, Robin Johnson, made to the Shakespearean story (there's a room where you come across a character from another play, Othello, muttering about a "brazen tart") and the option to try and give Hamlet a happier ending. But what I liked most was having to hold a plan of Elsinore in my head to make any headway with the game.

At every juncture, the game spits out lines of text describing the surroundings and telling you which ways you can make your character, Hamlet, move. He can go north, south, east, west, up or down. Every movement is a choice, and the need to choose is constant. If you don't want to spend all your time in an endless loop or bouncing back and forth along the same corridor, you need to remember which doors go where and how to get back up to the balcony to chat with your father's ghost. Later, I got into management and building sims like RollerCoaster Tycoon, Caesar III and Pharaoh, where a continual awareness of the game map is also key to success. In those, however, you have the advantage of being able to scroll around and see your whole domain on the screen. Mastering Hamlet via text alone flexed an otherwise dormant muscle in my imagination. It was a nice feeling.

That Hamlet game was released in 2003. I hadn't thought about it for over twenty years. Then, in 2025, I started writing a novel — something I had never done in earnest before. It was an idea that I had been toying with for a couple of years, so the plot and characters were fairly fleshed out by the time I started typing. Dialogue, too, flowed quite easily. I could make my characters stand still and talk to each other for pages and pages. But even though the physicality of the world they inhabited was clear to me, every time I tried to make them move around in it, everything became very stiff and awkward. I found myself spending hundreds of words needlessly describing what it felt like to descend stairs or run down a garden path, just so that I could move them from A to B. Writing a plausible exit from a room was an ordeal. Eventually, I realised. I was back in front of that blinking cursor, trying to remember with no visual reference whether Hamlet needed to walk north or turn east to have his crucial encounter with Ophelia.

I started drawing maps. Of rooms, of houses, of whole neighbourhoods that exist only in my head. Anywhere that I needed a character to pass through, I scribbled a wonky diagram of it. That way, the decision about whether they would go north, south, east or west had already been decided before I started typing my sentences. All I had to do was describe their passage. I am very bad at drawing and none of these maps will ever see the light of day. Everything is out of proportion. I doodle all over them, trying to get a character's trajectory correct.

It has helped, though. My illegible squiggles curb my tendency to write like Arnold Bennet in the Virginia Woolf essay "Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown". He, she contends, will describe any amount of geography and other minutiae — whether the suburban villa is freehold or exactly what role the flour mill plays in the local economy — all the while completely missing the fascinating character of Mrs Brown, the actual inhabitant of this place. My version of this was the long discourse I wrote about the depth of pile on a staircase someone was descending. There was even a historical digression about the merits or otherwise of Axminster carpets. That is not still in the book.

I was reading for my job at The Browser recently and came across an image of a map drawn by Vladimir Nabokov that he drew as a teaching aid for a class he was giving on Ulysses. He superimposed the events of the book and the different characters' passage through them on a map of Dublin, so that you can track Leopold or Stephen through the city and through time. Further investigation revealed that he did this for several books, including Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. I began to feel better. His plan of the house and what its inhabitants are doing in chapter thirteen looks rather like one of my own drawings.

Drawing diagrams of the physical spaces I'm trying to people, rather than writing like I'm spinning a text-based adventure game out of thin air, has kept the novel inching forwards. The process of describing movement still feels laboured to me, even if the sentences I settle on in the end are not especially ponderous. E.M. Forster said in Aspects of the Novel that in fiction people "come into the world more like parcels than human beings". Sometimes I still feel like the postmistress, hefting sacks of heavy mail and managing the flow of post around my book.

Connections rarely announce themselves in the present tense. Parallels and associations are revealed with hindsight. I spent much of last year dealing with a health problem that limited my ability to move about. It's not a recurrence of the cancer I wrote about in A Body Made of Glass — I'm still cancer-free. I'm keeping the details private, but the fatigue and pain does remind me of chemotherapy. That feeling of being strapped into an invisible exoskeleton that I have to move about the world in addition to my own body.

When you feel like this, the way you move through the world changes. People with disabilities and chronic illnesses, who use spoon theory to manage their energy, have always known this. Where once I was Hamlet, dashing back and forth across the castle with abandon because the person playing him (me!) kept forgetting to pick up important objects, I once more needed to be aware of how many times a day I could feasibly climb the stairs. It changes what your environment looks like, too. Little piles mount up everywhere, because it's not worth going to the kitchen until I have a full armful of things to take.

Towards the end of 2025 I was able to start some treatment that somewhat improves my energy levels, albeit with side effects, while I wait for my turn at the top of the surgery waiting list. I'm lucky even to have a potential resolution on the horizon. It was only once I was no longer planning my trips around the house with quite so much care that I realised that I had been stuck like one of my own characters, unable to leave a room or climb the stairs without pages of thought and planning. They moved as I moved: slowly and with care.

I'm writing more quickly now, in part because I'm not so tired. I'm walking again and have permission to try running some very slow intervals soon if I feel up to it. I'm not as static as I was three months ago. And so I'm trying to give the same shift to my characters. To leave the diagrams behind and just move. Instead of looking at the door and thinking about whether to open it, we simply slam it behind us as we leave the room.

Filed under: Essays, Blog

22 Jan 2026 1 min read Permalink

It Used To Be A Religious Sacrament!

Thirteen things this Thursday that I have read, watched, listened to or otherwise found noteworthy.

The most popular link last time was this handy printable calendar, with with Lena Dunham on her mum's style second.

There have been many Heated Rivalry takes. This one — The Truth About Yearning – is the best one I have read. I haven't watched the show yet, because I'm saving it up for the next time I have to take to my bed with a lurgy, but I have enjoyed surveying the discourse.
This was an interesting, if somewhat singular, discussion of "how to make a lot of money as an author even if you're not an NYT bestseller". I applaud anyone who shares finances transparently like this, and I thought the writer did a good job of acknowledging the combination of luck and effort that this involves.
A fun little browser game that is supposed to help you with playing the piano by ear.
A debunking of some major literary conspiracy theories, including the one about how Francis Bacon wrote the plays of Shakespeare and — new one to me — that the KGB secretly assassinated Albert Camus.
An introduction to the work of Pauline Baynes, who did the original illustrations for the Narnia books.
A collection of thoughts about enjoying January: "This is what having a personality is all about. You get to be illogical about things. It’s nice."
On the origins of the breakfast waffle (it used to be a religious sacrament!).
A poem about procrastinating while writing a poem: "The Poem You’ve Been Waiting For" by Jay Délise.
Chappell Roan and Lucy Dacus singing one of the best songs ever written, "The Book of Love" by The Magnetic Fields.
The Hairpin now has a proper online archive!
A regularly updated curated selection of weird articles, mostly from Wikipedia.
The answer to the question "what if M.C. Escher made browser games".
Please enjoy this footage of a man called Gerald unveiling a very long parsnip that he has grown inside an old drainpipe.

Filed under: Blog, Links

20 Jan 2026 6 min read Permalink

Reading Georgette Heyer: Devil's Cub

This is the 1969 Pan paperback edition of *Devil's Cub.* The novel was originally published by Heinemann in 1932.

My plan to read my way through Georgette Heyer's historical fiction in chronological order fell apart rather quickly. After my first two titles, The Black Moth and These Old Shades, I was so keen to keep reading about the character of "Devil" that I just skipped to his next book, 1932's Devil's Cub. Simon the Coldheart fans, I promise I will go back and read everything I've missed... Just as soon as I've satiated my desire for the Alastair family's adventures.

Devil's Cub picks up approximately 25 years after the end of These Old Shades. It follows the romantic entanglements of Dominic, Marquis of Vidal, son of Justin and Léonie who meet and fall in love in the previous book. Dominic is a rake with a capital R, and not in the toothless way that some contemporary historical romance writers like to gesture at. His behaviour is vicious and borderline criminal, as Heyer shows us in the arresting opening sequence. Dominic is travelling to a party and casually shoots a highwayman dead on the way, leaving the corpse still bleeding in the road. (I don't know if this is a sly wink at his father's sort-of outlaw origins in The Black Moth, but if it was I liked it.) I also appreciated Dominic's banter with his friend Charles Fox, who I think might be the first real-life historical figure with a speaking part that I have encountered in my reading of Heyer so far. Fox and the other high society types make it clear that they are less shocked by Dominic's habit of extra-judicial murder than they are by the fact that he doesn't bother to clean up the scene afterwards.

This becomes a recurring motif as we follow Dominic through the next few chapters. The denizens of the highest social circles of the early 1780s are not shocked by the same things that we would be today. Thus, Dominic's dalliance with Sophia, a "Cit", aka a bourgeois, middle-class girl, is far less acceptable than the time he spends with more professional paramours. "Opera dancers!", his Aunt Fanny mutters darkly at one point. The same goes for his duelling habit. He has killed at least one person in a duel before, in addition to his drive-by execution in the opening chapter, but it is only when he shoots someone indoors, in an impromptu duel in a gaming hell, that it is felt that he has crossed a line. By teasing out the subtleties of this flexible Georgian moral code, Heyer is able to gesture at the absurdity of Dominic's class without ever mocking or deriding her characters.

This was just one of many wonderful pieces of craft from Heyer that I admired while reading this book. I did feel like I had skipped quite a few phases of her development, because this writer from 1932 has many more tricks up her sleeve than the one who was writing in the early years of the 1920s. The pacing and plotting of this book is magnificent. Every time I thought to myself "I wish Dominic had a straight man to bounce jokes off" or "when is a parent going to show up and meddle in this", my wish was fulfilled on the very next page. Each character has a development arc, too. Dominic goes from dissipated rake to intense, protective fiancé, while Mary, his intended, learns to enjoy herself a little while still keeping her ethics intact. And the menacing appearance of Devil at the end, almost like a fairy godmother, to wrap the whole story up in a bow? Chef's kiss, no notes.

Mary Challoner is a much more complex and well-rounded character than any of the Heyer heroines I have encountered so far. She's the older sister of the lovely Sophia, who we learn is a "yallow-headed chit" with a "frippery brain". Sophia has indeed been blessed with gorgeous golden curls, limpid blue eyes and the ability to flirt like it's her job, whereas Mary is something bordering on a bluestocking. She's had a proper education and finds her mother's insistence on trying to convert Sophia's beauty into a place in the ranks of the nobility quite ridiculous. Mary is sensible and pragmatic, never letting her emotions get the better of her. No hysterics or vapours for her. My kind of girl.

The introduction of the Challoners allows Heyer to explore more class nuances than if the story was set solely among the haute ton. Mary's father was of noble birth and cut off by his family when he married her mother, who is merely the sister of a city merchant. The widowed Mrs Challoner takes her inspiration from Mrs Gunning, the real-life mother of two beauties who in the 1750s sent ripples through society when they managed to marry a Duke and an Earl respectively. What Mrs Challoner seems to have missed, though, is that even though the Gunning sisters were not at all wealthy, they were of aristocratic origin — both their parents were of the Irish nobility, with their mother being the daughter of a viscount. Sophia might be beautiful, but with her vulgar manners and nothing but a "bundle of Cits" in her family tree, she stands no chance.

The incident that pushes Mary out of her comfortable milieu and onto the path to wedded bliss is a typically cunning piece of work by Heyer. A note arrives addressed to "Miss Challoner", which is delivered to her as the eldest daughter of the house. It's from Dominic and was meant for Sophia, since it gives all the details of their planned flight from London together — he thinks they're going to have a lovely roll in the hay while he lives down the shame of his latest duel, while Sophia thinks she can trick him to the altar somehow and become a Marquess. Not only does the note allow Mary to pre-empt the scheme, taking Sophia's place to protect her sister's reputation and marital prospects, it also shows how little regard for Mary Dominic has early on in the book. He has forgotten that she exists at all, hence the application of her rightful title to her younger sister. This gives their early scenes together on the road greater tension and makes the eventual resolution feel completely earned.

What Devil's Cub has that my previous Heyer reads lacked is a very capable handling of shadow and light. Every sweet, happy moment has a drop of darkness to it, and every melodramatic scene is undercut with humour. From Dominic's first entrance as a cold-blooded lout to Mary's very serious conversation with Devil at the end, there is always something that makes the reader smile. By the time she published Devil's Cub, Heyer was the author of (I think?) eleven other novels. She had clearly learned from the writing of every one of them, because this one is a triumph.

Five Other Thoughts

The secondary couple, Dominic's cousin Juliana and her self-effacing beau Frederick, were my least favourite thing about this book. The latter amply demonstrates that there's nothing so annoying as someone who says "no, whatever you want" when you're trying to make a plan. It's a performance of courtesy and humility that actually throws the onus on the other person to do all the thinking and decision making. No wonder Mary comes to find him infuriating. An attractive romantic lead is also one who can think for themself! I have to imagine that Juliana will force him to be a little more decisive in future.
I enjoyed the scene where Dominic involuntarily snaps the sticks of Juliana's fan, so upset is he at the very idea that a lady of his, ie Mary, would ever flirt with another man. It's very like his father's habit of crushing snuffboxes when angry.
I'm getting the sense that Heyer really didn't like the colour puce. Only terrible bores — like Mary's cousin and unwelcome suitor Joshua — wear puce. And someone always comments on how much it doesn't suit them.
I adored Uncle Rupert's love affair with his six dozen bottles of port. I hope they all got home safely.
I felt slightly offended on behalf of the town of Dijon. I'm sure it is a nice place! The other characters were offensively astonished that someone as rich and fashionable Dominic would ever go there.

My Favourite Phrases

Juliana is a "rattle-pate".
Two good financial words — "dunning" and "milleleva" (I think the latter is a bit like a "pony" ie an amount of money one might lose while gambling).
Mary is at one point described as "Miss Prunes and Prisms".
A "sulky", a type of carriage.
Dominic says to Mary that her conduct in running away with him was that of "the veriest trollop".

Thanks for reading. I'm making making way through Georgette Heyer's historical novels — you can find all the entries so far here.

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Filed under: Reading Georgette Heyer, Blog

15 Jan 2026 1 min read Permalink

Maybe I Need To Accept That I Simply Hate The Archers

Thirteen things this Thursday that I have read, watched, listened to or otherwise found noteworthy.

Last week instead of links I shared thirteen small life changes/improvements I made in 2025 and will be sticking with in 2026.

Peter Watkins's strange and wonderful 1964 film Culloden is currently available to watch on BBC iPlayer. If you have access to it, I highly recommend watching it, as well as the making of documentary from 2006. It's a thought-provoking piece that presents a re-enactment of the 1746 battle between the British Army and the Jacobite rebels as a contemporary war documentary (Watkins was very inspired by 1960s Vietnam reportage). I've visited the battlefield monuments and site before, but from this I gained a deeper understanding of both the extent and horror of the British forces' crimes and how badly the Jacobite leaders handled the battle.
A handy printable year-at-a-glance calendar.
Lena Dunham's thoughts about her mum's style are very sweet.
A game where you guess which country a TV channel is from based on a random snippet of live broadcast. Prepare to have all your national stereotypes shattered!
An interesting essay that I think got a bit buried by December list season: The Strange Career of Joan Didion, Cop Hater.
Apparently we used to hate hedgehogs because they seemed... witchy.
Eve O. Schaub is growing a dress (she's spinning the flax now).
Thoughts on resting just to rest, rather than to be ready to over-function again.
Being really into keyboards (the kind you use for a computer) seems like a nice hobby.
Is performative offline the new performative online? I think it has been for years; I used to hate that because of my job I couldn't be one of those people who quit the internet entirely.
This is a fun interactive infographic that shows you the relative sizes of things, from a strand of DNA to a forest-sized organism that hangs out in Utah.
Katherine Angel explains why she likes The Archers. I've always blamed not my having English parents for my inability to listen to more than 30 seconds of it, but she grew up in Belgium and loves it, so maybe I need to accept that I simply hate it on its own merits.
How medieval people from different cultures understood the moon.

Filed under: Blog, Links

14 Jan 2026 2 min read Permalink

Review for The Observer: In Love With Love by Ella Risbridger

I have a new review out in the Observer, of In Love With Love: The Persistence and Joy of Romantic Fiction by Ella Risbridger:

I liked this book and it would definitely be an excellent reference work if you're newish to reading romance. The tone becomes a bit self-consciously quirky in places, but not so often that it is distracting.

Here's an extract from my review:

"Risbridger's knowledge of this type of fiction is both broad and deep. She hits all the expected subjects: the ever-evolving appeal of Pride and Prejudice; the global phenomenon of Fifty Shades of Grey; the endless fascination of fairytales and especially Prince Charming; the enduring, prolific powerhouse that is Mills & Boon. But she is well versed enough to go beyond the obvious. The connections she makes between genre stalwarts, literary greats and newer trends are delightful. Mr Darcy has correspondences with the creature of Beauty and the Beast and with the "grumpy hot billionaire" protagonists who brood at us from Kindle Unlimited covers. Fifty Shades of Grey is a partly epistolary novel like Frankenstein or Les Liaisons Dangereuses because its central couple are continually exchanging text messages and emails that are printed in full. A Prince Charming can be a science professor in late 1930s Vienna or Peter Wimsey in a golden age detective novel by Dorothy L Sayers, or even a blue alien with some exciting extra bits in his loincloth in the hugely popular recent series Ice Planet Barbarians. In fact, the chief joy of In Love With Love is that the reader will come out of it with a long and varied list of other books to read."

If you purchase this book from one of the following places, I receive a small commission that supports my writing. The price remains the same for you.

Filed under: Blog

13 Jan 2026 7 min read Permalink

Reading Georgette Heyer: These Old Shades

This is the 1956 Pan paperback edition of *These Old Shades.* The novel was originally published by Heinemann in 1926.

I finished Georgette Heyer's debut novel, The Black Moth, wishing that I could read more about the intriguing, unusual character at its centre — Tracy Belmanoir, Duke of Andover, better known as "Devil". A small amount of research revealed that I could do just that by jumping forward in her bibliography to her sixth published novel, These Old Shades from 1926. I couldn't resist.

Heyer began writing this book in 1922 and intended it to be a more action-packed continuation of the 1750s world she had covered in her debut. However, she ended up putting it aside for a few years — publishing novels about other historical periods like The Great Roxhythe and Simon the Coldheart in the interim — and only picked it back up again in 1925, battling to complete it for publication in the difficult weeks after her father died. It's not a conventional sequel. Rather, it reworks Devil and a few of the minor characters into a new versions in a new story. Her title, These Old Shades, is a quotation from a poem and a nice little nod to the reader who might recognise her old characters in their new guises.

Her shadowy villain becomes Justin Alastair, Duke of Avon, an English aristocrat living in France who is now enjoying a period of prosperity after earlier gambling losses. He still has a reputation for coldness and dissolute behaviour, but his edges have been softened. There is light in his eyes now; he has a studied boredom about him, yet he's not the nihilist of the earlier book. To corrupt a phrase, in The Black Moth, we see a "Devil without a cause", who can bring himself to care for nothing. By contrast, "Satanas", as Justin is sometimes called, has passion and an object in life. Even if his "cause" is to revenge himself on a French aristocrat, the Comte de Saint-Vire, who twenty years earlier refused Justin permission to marry his sister. All of which is to say, while this version is still dark, he isn't abducting debutantes just to feel something any more.

The instrument of his revenge literally bumps into Justin in the opening chapter of These Old Shades. A poor young lad named Léon collides with him on the mean streets of Paris while trying to avoid a beating. Seemingly on a whim, Justin uses his diamond tie pin to buy Léon from his older brother — a grim transaction involving a human life — and takes the child home to become his page. Léon is pathetically grateful and declares his undying loyalty and obedience to his new master. Justin seems to find this rather droll. Over the next few nights he parades his new red-headed, base-born page through all of the fashionable establishments of Paris, to the general amusement of his social circle.

Of course, Satanas has a scheme afoot. He has discerned at a glance that Léon is really Léonie, a girl of twenty who for some as-yet unknown reason has been living and working at her brother's tavern in disguise as a much younger boy. Her red hair and black eyebrows instantly remind Justin of his enemy, the Comte de Saint-Vire. He can also apparently tell that she is no tavern-keeper's sister and by rights belongs to a much higher social class. All signs point to her being a wonderful way of embarrassing Saint-Vire and repaying him for the humiliation he visited upon Justin all those years ago. It works from the start: Léon causes quite a stir following Justin around Paris, including at Versailles. His enemy is provoked.

From here, Heyer keeps ramping up the drama. Léon is informed that she must be Léonie full-time now, a prospect that fills her with horror. Justin takes her to England to stay with his sister and aunt — propriety demands that she can't follow him around town now that she's officially a girl — and we are treated to a makeover montage worth of a late nineties romcom. There's plenty of humour in Léonie's reactions to women's fashions. She is very against having to wear skirts. Then Léonie is abducted by the Comte, drugged and smuggled back to France (she, hilariously, dubs her captor a "pig-person" and refers to him this way for the rest of the book). Heyer breaks with the conventions of sensational fiction, though, and has Léonie mastermind her own escape, rather than showing her as a helpless female who needs a male character's aid. She rides to safety with Rupert, Justin's younger brother, having already extricated herself from the Comte's clutches by the time he arrives. She's no damsel in distress.

Rupert's horse, by the way, has a lovely comic subplot of its own. He effectively steals it from a blacksmith's in his haste to chase down Léonie and is then pursued himself for several chapters by the horse's rightful owner, a middle-class merchant, who just doesn't think that aristocratic derring-do is a good enough reason for him to be both missing a horse and out of pocket. It undercuts some of the more melodramatic stuff wonderfully.

Because the melodrama is not in short supply in the second half of this book. Justin's scheme leads up to a grand denouement in which he monologues for several pages, gradually leading the assembled society worthies towards an understanding of Léonie's true identity. A gun is produced, someone shoots themselves right there in the salon, and Justin just laughs maniacally through the chaos of it all. There's still a touch of the old Devil about him, for sure.

But unlike the original Devil, Justin does also enjoy life on the way to this bloody finale. The chapters that deal with Léonie's introduction into Parisian society and all the different fashions everybody wears are wonderfully light-hearted and entertaining. The historical moment is rendered in much more detail in this book and the cameos by real-life figures such as Louis XV and La Pompadour are a good addition. There's a real Cinderella feel about this aspect of the novel, with Justin's sister Fanny playing the role of Léonie's fairy godmother. Rescued from her humble station and decked out in the finest silks and stains, she does indeed go to the ball.

The cross dressing aspect of the plot requires the reader to trust that Heyer can bring it all to a satisfactory conclusion in the end. Which she does, even though for the first two-thirds of the book, it's simply ridiculous that nobody apart from Justin has noticed or remarked on the fact that poor naive little "Léon" is really a woman of twenty wearing trousers. Sorry, breeches. I wondered if it might have been a little easier to read if Heyer had dropped a few hints that people had noticed, but were too polite or too curious to mention it. Léonie herself is also a bit implausible as a character, a confusing bundle of innocence and wisdom who seems to shift about in maturity as the plot demands. She's great fun throughout, though, so I forgive her.

Keen-eyed readers will have noticed that I haven't mentioned the romance element of this book at all. There is one, and it is the Cinderella moment that you might expect. It just wasn't very interesting to me. I was far more focused on the kidnappings and the witticisms. I know that Heyer is famous for her romantic fiction but I don't feel like I've read her at her best in this arena yet. I have that still to look forward to! That aside, this was a very enjoyable novel and I completely understand why it became an early success that solidified Heyer's reputation as a truly popular novelist.

Three Other Thoughts

I found it refreshing that Léonie, post-makeover montage, is continually begging to be allowed to be Léon again. She's sarcastic about it, too: "Monseigneur, do you understand what it is to be put into petticoats?". As much as she seems to enjoy rendering everyone speechless by appearing at a ball in a silver evening gown, for day to day life, she prefers breeches and being allowed to say exactly what she thinks. Who wouldn't? I feel like cross-dressing heroines in historical romances are usually shown to be more grateful for being "rescued" from the horror of having to wear trousers.
Early on in the book, Justin crushes a gold snuff box in his bare hands to show just how much he hates someone. Exemplary character work: we immediately know that he's melodramatic and rich.
The book is predicated on some pretty rigid class assumptions — Léonie is "obviously" too good to be the daughter of a farmer and must therefore be of noble birth. I have no doubt that this was representative of attitudes in the 1750s and it reminded me of how flexible modern historical fiction has become with this sort of thing.

My Favourite Phrases

This is going to become a regular feature, I can tell. Susan, a commenter on my post about The Black Moth, has directed me to one of Heyer's slang sources, Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue by Francis Grose from 1811, and I'm having a wonderful time perusing it. Here are my highlights from These Old Shades:

Justin is "always a damned smooth-tongued icicle", according to a close friend.
"Avon swept the lady a magnificent leg" — I still love this phrase!
Someone is "seated mumchance", which from research I think means sitting silently.
Once Léon has become Léonie, she and Justin discuss which slang she is allowed to use now that she's a girl. He insists that she is not, under any circumstances, to say "lawks" or "tare an' ouns". The only permissible exclamations are "'pon rep" and "Lud!". It is not explained why these are more suitable for women.

Thanks for reading. I'm making making way through Georgette Heyer's historical novels — you can find all the entries so far here.

You can support my work with a recurring contribution or leave a one-off tip.

Filed under: Blog, Reading Georgette Heyer

09 Jan 2026 2 min read Permalink

A Gentleman's Offer by Emma Orchard

A 2025 romance novel that pays homage to Georgette Heyer.

Emma Orchard's debt to Georgette Heyer is evident throughout A Gentleman's Offer. Orchard, a former copy editor at Mills & Boon, makes this overt — she writes in her acknowledgements how she began with Heyer fanfiction during the Covid lockdowns and then moved onto her own original characters. As I've been exploring Georgette Heyer's work myself, I've become interested in her influence on contemporary historical fiction and was curious to see how it would manifest here.

I recognised a lot of her favourite tropes in A Gentleman's Offer. The hero, Dominic or "Beau" de Lacy, is languid, sardonic, and very concerned with his personal appearance, rather like Jack in The Black Moth and Alverstoke in Frederica. The heroine, Meg Nightingale, is an outspoken young woman with a very dysfunctional family, who is thrown into a high-stakes scheme to preserve her sister's reputation. There's also plenty of Heyer-esque slang (people are "in alt" and use epithets like "frippery fellow").

The actual plot of the book, in which Meg has to impersonate her twin sister Maria after the latter suddenly disappears three weeks before her big society wedding to Dominic, was of less interest to me than the world of London high society in 1817 and the characters who inhabit it. The action turns a bit farcical in the second half, although not to a degree that overly bothered me.

The big difference to a genuine Heyer novel is the time Orchard spends on physical desire; there are the sort of explicit scenes that Georgette could never have published. They help this book feel more like its own work and less of a pastiche, as does the introduction of themes around sexuality and race, which are handled in a manner that feels appropriate to the 1817 setting.

This was a quick and entertaining read, which pays due homage to the originator of the form.

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Filed under: Blog, Book Review

08 Jan 2026 7 min read Permalink

Then I Stopped Being Able To Close The Wardrobe Door

Thirteen small suggestions for a slightly better life.

Every new year, I think about the bookshop where I worked as a teenager. Specifically, a shift I always did on 24th December. While the shop was open that day, we were very busy with last-minute Christmas shoppers. Then after closing the staff stayed for an extra two hours to turn what had been a festive wonderland of abundant decorations and displays of lovely books into an austere landscape of piled up diet manuals and memoirs of recovery against the odds. It had to be suitable for the "new year, new me" customers who would come through the door the next time we opened. It always felt rather jarring, given that at the time we were making this switchover, Christmas hadn't even happened yet.

I think about this because it makes me remember how utterly arbitrary our January interest in resolutions and goals is. I'm a sucker for a new hack or "one weird trick" — normally, purchasing a new notebook — if I get too invested in the idea that something about me has to change. I have to ask myself: is this really something I want to do, or am I merely reacting to the fact that the world has (metaphorically speaking) just replaced all of the Christmas decorations with diet books? In fact, I find that the best use for this season of self-improvement is to do some thinking about what has worked in the past rather than making any changes or rash promises for future change.

Last year, I made the first Thursday Thirteen post of the year a round-up of small habits or new activities I had acquired in the previous 12 months and which I planned to continue. I'm doing that again today. These are little things that have brought me joy, made my life a bit easier, or helped me get closer to my big-picture intentions. They are, of course, specific to my life and are not inteneded to be universal advice. Perhaps you will find a spark of inspiration below for your own version.

Normal service with links will resume next week, once I've spent enough time on the internet again to find some good ones.

Only subscribe to one streaming service at a time. I absolutely despise paging through the homepage of Netflix (or any other streamer) looking for something, anything, I can bear to watch. I usually get frustrated and just pick a show, which I then abandon twenty minutes in because I don't like it, and start scrolling again. It's the opposite of relaxing. Eventually, I came to realise that this was a problem caused by there being too much choice. Having subscriptions to multiple streaming services (a significant financial outlay) was creating such a vast pool of things I could watch that I was actually watching very little. Since all the major ones let you subscribe by the month and then cancel without penalty, I now just have one at a time. I keep a list of shows and films I'm interested in seeing (compiled from reviews and personal recommendations) and then when I'm ready to choose my next service, I pick the one with the longest accumulated list of things I want to see on it. If there's enough, I might even keep it for two months! You can also be quite broad in what you choose to define as a "streaming service" — one month, we had Dropout, for instance, a video library made by the people who used to run CollegeHumor. I watched lots of their show Smartypants, in which funny people give Powerpoint presentations about their niche obsessions/irritations (it has big Taskmaster energy). Since I implemented this system, there has been no more annoying scrolling or watching of terrible documentaries "just to put something on" while we eat dinner. If you keep the date that you join/cancel each one consistent — I aim for the last day of the month — it makes it easy to avoid being caught by an auto-renew.
Have a toilet bag that stays in your luggage. I had seen this tip a lot but only implemented it in 2025. It's incredible. I used to spend ages squeezing creams into smaller tubes and often forgot something vital, like toothpaste. Now I keep the complete travel toilet bag in my most-used rucksack and know that when I've packed it, I've packed everything I will need. The only maintenance you need to do comes at the end of a trip when you top up or replace anything in the bag before you put it away.
After cooking, wait until food is room temperature to eat it. Somewhere along the way while I was learning to cook, I internalised the rule that everything needs to be as hot as possible at the moment that you put it on the table and/or the plate. Hotter than the sun, if possible. Which is just not true, and is in fact a recipe for burning your mouth when you take the first bite. I've started letting dishes rest for a bit after coming out of the oven, or dishing up and then doing a couple of minutes of tidying up before tucking in. It's a revelation! I don't want my food to be stone cold, but I don't want it to be piping hot either. When it's just nicely warm, you can properly taste all of the flavours that you spent so long trying to cultivate.
Wash your head, not your hair. This one is very personal to me and my type of hair/scalp so your mileage may vary. However, I've found it much more useful when shampooing to think about washing the surface of my head rather than the strands of hair that hang from it. I get a much more thorough clean this way, more akin to the wonderful scrub they do when you go to the hairdressers.
Throw things away, even if it is uncomfortable. Overconsumption is awful, but hoarding things that you don't want/need but can't bear the idea of going to landfill is awful too. Especially if the things are now broken and useless and degrading the experience of being in your space. Get rid of things in the most responsible possible way (repurpose, sell, donate, recycle, throw away) and then don't buy too many things again. This last bit is the hardest part.
Do a pantry audit. One afternoon while trying to avoid doing some work I didn't want to do, I took everything out of the kitchen cupboards, checked the expiry dates, made a quick tally on a piece of paper of what we had, and then put back what we could still eat. I've been keeping up with my record since, and it's quite eye-opening how much less food we've been buying now that I know what we already have. I'm sure there are fancy apps and databases that you can use for this, although I tend to find that the lofi, quick way is usually the way that will stick for me.
Use chopsticks to eat snacks. I'm sure everyone who uses chopsticks as their primary cutlery already knows this. I've only just learned that using them to eat crisps/crackers/nuts is a great way to munch and keep your hands clean at the same time.
Mend things, even if you can't do a perfect job. This is connected to my throwing away point, above. I used to have a graveyard of clothes in the bottom of my wardrobe that needed a minor repair, like a darn or a patch or a missing button replacing. I wouldn't throw them away, but I also wouldn't just do the job because I was waiting for some mythical future moment when I would be "better" at mending. (This attitude might have been caused by watching too much aesthetic mending content on TikTok and Instagram, before I quit social media.) It got so bad that I stopped being able to close the wardrobe door so had to do something about the pile. It turns out, it doesn't really matter if my darning is unattractive or my sewing is crooked. It's just nice to be able to use my things again.
Enjoy inconsequential chats with strangers. It's pleasant to talk to people, even for a couple of minutes, about their holiday or their dog or what they're making for dinner that night. I don't pursue random strangers with my desire for conversation, obviously, but if we get chatting anyway because of a transport delay/our dogs playing together, I now let myself enjoy it rather than constantly scanning the horizon for the nearest exit.
Make your homepage blank. Methods for doing this will vary by device or operating system (just search for yours), but I highly recommend making the homepage for your browser a blank page of some sort. In Chrome, you can just make it about:blank. I find that it forces me to remember what I opened it for in the first place, rather than getting sucked into looking at recommended news stories or whatever other algorithmic stuff it tries to serve you.
Use bar soap. I have really got into solid soap in the last year. I'm very prone to dry skin and it seems to help with that (probably because I'm using less of it per wash) and it also generates way less plastic waste. It lasts for ages, too, and you can easily buy it from small businesses rather than big chains. I'm personally partial to the products of The Soap Dairy in the Lake District, but I'm sure there will be something lovely local to you. I have a sisal soap sack for in-shower exfoliation and a travel tin. You can also get dry bags for travelling with your soap, although I've been fine so far with the tin. As a bonus, you don't have to worry about it at airport security, as it counts as a solid not a liquid.
Replace paper towels with cloths. We've accumulated a lot of random cleaning cloths over the years. I also now generate more in my ongoing attempt to find uses for old fabric rather than sending it to landfill (just cut it up and roughly hem it!). They are now my paper towels. I lay them out in a long row on the kitchen counter, slightly overlapping, and then I wind the whole lot tightly around our paper towel spindle (we have the kind that is just a stick on a base, like this). Then you can just take one off any time you need something to mop up a spill etc. Ideally I would have a dedicated place to put the dirty ones, perhaps in a bin under the sink until I have enough for a wash, but I'm still working on that and currently just throw them straight in the washing machine with whatever is going next. They air dry on a spinner thing in the airing cupboard and then join the queue to be used again. I do still keep a roll of disposable paper towels in the cupboard for jobs that can't be done any other way (sometimes you just need one to germinate some seeds on) but the cloths do most of the everyday work.
Use your RSS reader for everything. I use my RSS reader for keeping track of all sorts of things, not just blogs and websites. My one of choice is Feedly and it can handle email newsletters, subreddits, YouTube channels, Patreons, podcasts and more. I like having all of my content easily browsable in the same place and find that it helps me spend less time aimlessly clicking around the internet getting distracted.

Do you have any little life improvements like this that you'll be sticking with for the next year? Tell us all about them in the comments.

Filed under: Links, Blog

06 Jan 2026 6 min read Permalink

Reading Georgette Heyer: The Black Moth

This is the 1965 Pan paperback edition of *The Black Moth.* The novel was originally published by Heinemann in 1921.

I began The Black Moth with very little information beyond its biographical context. Heyer first invented the story to amuse her younger brother Boris during an illness; her father, overhearing its telling, encouraged her to write it properly for publication. She was nineteen when the first editor she approached accepted it, launching a prolific career she pursued with startling confidence — no plans for further education or a day job. That confidence paid off: when her father died a few years later, Georgette's writing supported her brothers through school and kept her mother's household running. A very important book for understanding Heyer as a writer, then, but not one with a titanic literary reputation of its own.

After a brief and mysterious prologue featuring an insolent duke writing a letter about a failed romantic affair, Heyer plunges the reader straight into the hurly-burly of a country coaching inn in the early 1750s. Here can be found one Sir Anthony Ferndale, a foppish baronet which is in fact, we are quickly told, a persona sometimes adopted by a disgraced peer, Lord John Carstares (known to his friends as Jack). He tumbled down from the heights of high society six years before after being exposed as a cheat at cards. He has since turned himself into a proficient highwayman, albeit one in the Robin Hood vein. He forwards the better part of his ill-gotten gains to the deserving poor. A year before the book opens, he had the bad luck to hold up a carriage containing his estranged younger brother Richard, which Jack thought was very funny but his sibling found both mortifying and confusing.

Within just a few pages, Jack emerges as a man of honour who also retains a sense of humour about his altered state in life. It is clear from the start that he, rather than the mysterious aristocrat in the prologue, will stand in the role of romantic hero for this book. During a visit from the Carstares family solicitor we learn that Jack's estranged father has now died and he has thus inherited the title of Earl of Wyncham and associated estates. He, though, prefers his disreputable life on the road to returning to high society and dealing with the social consequences of the cheating incident (this betrayal of honour while gambling seems to be of seismic significance to everyone in this book). He would quite like Richard to step into his shoes. Richard, meanwhile, has married Lavinia Belmanoir, who is a high society beauty and crucially sister of the Duke of Andover, our friend from the prologue.

It might seem like I've given away half the plot of the book here, but I promise that all of this happens in just the first dozen pages. Heyer, even in her first novel, showed great skill at conveying plot and character information quickly and without overwhelming the reader. Already, I felt connected to the characters and the scenario that she was presenting. Jack especially. He may have silly opinions about silk breeches, but he is a fundamentally decent person who has sacrificed his own comfort and prestige in order to give his brother the life he desired.

From here, the story jogs along briskly. Jack, despite his repudiation of title and wealth, is set on a course back to his rightful station in life. The universe (and Georgette) does not want him to be a highwayman forever. His true identity is almost discovered again when he holds up a carriage containing a justice of the peace and he is only saved by the fact that said justice is his own erstwhile best friend, Miles O'Hara. Jack wriggles out of that awkwardness, but his outlaw career is once again severely endangered when he fights a roadside duel with none other than the insolent duke of the prologue, whom Jack catches in the act of abducting a very attractive young woman from her aunt's carriage.

So far, so much derring-do. Exactly what I had expected for my first historical Heyer: aristocrats with elaborate wardrobes and complicated honour codes, much dashing about the countryside in carriages and on horseback, and a splendid sprinkling of era-specific slang (more on that below). While the wit exhibited by Jack and the cleverly-sketched minor characters — such as Molly O'Hara and Jim the valet — do show promise, there is little here to elevate it beyond the typical early twentieth century historical adventure novel. Yet there is one major element of this book that to me absolutely prohibits its dismissal as juvenile or derivative. And that is the Black Moth himself.

His Grace the Duke of Andover, or "Devil" to his friends, is an extraordinary character. He hovers menacingly on the edge of the Robin Hood, swashbuckling story I have just described, seemingly without a motive other than to make everyone else uncomfortable. His sister Lavinia's marriage to Jack's unfortunate brother Richard is rather tempestuous. Together with another brother, Andrew, the three Belmanoir siblings seem to exist to be extravagant, without deriving any particular pleasure from their profligate habits. They are perpetually quarrelsome and world-weary, the Duke by far the worst of them. Nobody ever seems to know where he is or what he is up to, either. He scorns predictability and the usual rhythms of society. He flits about the country restlessly, unable to settle to life in either the country or the town. He is always arguing with his family and looming menacingly at debutantes. Heyer gives him the moniker of "Black Moth" because he dresses only in black as a contrast with the apricot and puce and gold worn by every other character. In a novel where men's elaborate costumes receive as much description as women's, this refusal to take part in the general sartorial gaiety marks him as fundamentally apart.

The Duke comes across as almost a nihilist, taking pleasure in nothing and immune to the structures of honour that otherwise rule his social set. He seems incapable of love, either romantically or platonically. He is a fascinating character for a sheltered young woman to have written, a shadow-man who lurks on the periphery of the bright, gay world that she has otherwise created here. He is definitely not good, but he's not purely evil, either. Eventually the romance plot pushes him into the position of Jack's antagonist, but even then there is nothing truly villainous about him. The climax of the book involves another abduction of a young woman, committed by the Duke, yet you feel that his heart is hardly in it and he would probably have got bored before he did anything irreversibly awful. As such, he is allowed to fade away from this incident largely unscathed.

His punishment is of a more karmic kind. He eventually loses his heart, for real, to Jack's bride Diana. The book closes as it opens, with an epistolary epilogue in which the Black Moth acknowledges, but does not really resolve, the tragedy of his unrequited love for another man's wife. I finished it with the feeling that he was the true protagonist, not the swashbuckling aristocratic highwayman who gets the girl, even though we spend much less time with Tracy Belmanoir, Duke of Andover. Heyer could have written a conventional love story interspersed with action sequences. Instead we get this sly portrait of a restless, cynical, grim man who finally realises he has the capacity for love only when it is too late to do anything about it. It isn't romantic, but it is very interesting and even rather sad. I would read this book again, I think, but only to try and fill in the gaps of what "Devil" is up to while the rest of the lavishly-dressed adventurers are cavorting around. Heyer left me wanting to know what the Black Moth was doing while I wasn't in his company. For a romance novel written by a teenager as entertainment for her sick brother, that's a genuine literary achievement.

Three Other Thoughts

On the morning of a threatened flight from the marital home, neither wife nor husband can drink their morning cup of chocolate in bed, they are so upset. This little gastronomic aside is somehow both childish and endearing.
In fact, everyone in this book — with the exception of the Black Moth himself — is quite childish most of the time. Is it because Heyer was herself so young, or is she showing how facile the life of the idle rich is/was?
Jack has a very sensitive aesthetic sense. He cares very deeply about cravats and waistcoats. It's shown that he can sort embroidery silks into precise shades and tones better than any of the female characters. I like this as a trait for a male character.

My Favourite Phrases

From my reading of Heyer's crime fiction, I already know that she is quite handy with a turn of phrase and the period slang that she dug out (or simply invented?) for this book was marvellous. Here is a selection.

A woman is deplored as a "spendthrift jade".
Someone declares in a vexing situation that "tis a plaguey nuisance".
To express sympathy, a character says "my poor lamp!" (I think this means "poor thing").
When she is crying and crossed in love, Diana says "Oh, are all men such big stupids?".
Quite regularly, men are described as making someone "a marvellous leg". I think this is a bow or reverence? I love this phrase and yearn for reasons to use it in everyday conversation.

Thanks for reading. I'm making my way through Georgette Heyer's historical novels — you can find all entries here.

You can support my work with a recurring contribution or leave a one-off tip.

Filed under: Reading Georgette Heyer, Blog