GEORGETTE HEYER, Bath Tangle (1955)

I've been meaning to get around to sampling a Georgette Heyer novel for at least a couple of years, but it wasn't until I came across this quite lovely hardcover of Bath Tangle on our unexpected trip to San Diego a couple of months ago—and for only about $6 to boot—that I finally took the plunge.  (It's not a valuable edition or anything, just an American reprint from the 1970s, but it's still lovely.)  I recalled being told or reading somewhere that this was one of Heyer's best novels, and the book itself was so seductive (it just felt good in my hands, a concept my fellow book fetishists will surely understand) that I couldn't help jumping right in.  In the end, I had a totally unexpected but rollickingly fun weekend's reading out of it. 

(Although Heyer hardly qualifies as a "lesser-known" author, I can't resist writing a little about the book here.  But as it happens, I have a couple of quite obscure titles winging their way to me via Interlibrary Loan at this moment, so more obscurity will be coming along soon.)

I had expected that my first encounter with Heyer would be one of her mysteries, which have been recommended to me repeatedly.  This was because, somehow, I was never quite sure that a "Regency romance" would be exactly my cup of tea.  But happily it turned out to be exactly the right cup of tea for the moment.

One of Heyer's later novels, Bath Tangle begins intriguingly with two very different young women in mourning.  The younger, Fanny—still quite naïve, inexperienced, and socially insecure—is the widow of the elderly Earl of Spenborough, with whom she shared a short-lived, affectionate, but hardly passionate marriage.  The older is Serena, the Earl's daughter by his first marriage—sophisticated, sharp-witted, always at ease, and indifferent to the gossip she creates at every turn.  The women are close friends, and their situation is immediately interesting because Fanny—though younger and less knowledgeable—is anointed with the respectability of her position as a widow, and is free to act as chaperone or set up her own household, while Serena—far more knowledgeable and far better equipped to take care of herself—is expected to behave as a demure maiden.  Heyer cleverly creates a scenario where the ridiculousness of these social expectations can be frequently highlighted without a trace of heavy-handedness.

The two women set up housekeeping together at the dower house on the Earl's estate (the estate itself having been taken over by the Earl's cousin and his grasping wife), and then, bored, take a house in Bath for a few months.  (Wouldn't we all love to have the leisure to casually take a house in Bath for six months when we happen to be bored?)

The plot is thickened with various well-drawn and entertaining characters.  There's the swarthy (but not terribly attractive?) Marquis of Rotherham, a sharp-tongued, fabulously wealthy Heathcliff-ian figure who was once betrothed to Serena and who has now been made the trustee of her fortune until she marries.  There's Major Kirkby, Serena's love-interest of seven years earlier, whom she was forbidden to marry then due to his poverty, but who has now returned with an unexpectedly inherited estate and money of his own.  There's Serena's aunt, Lady Theresa, with whom she fights but who sounds like someone you'd invite to a cocktail party to keep things lively.  And there's the loathsome Lady Laleham, seeking to make a wealthy marriage for her dim-witted daughter Emily, and Lady Laleham's "dreadfully vulgar" mother, Mrs. Floore, who is hard not to love and who provides a good deal of the novel's comic entertainment.

The plot is as light and fluffy as you might imagine, and it unfolds with a great deal of charm and humor as the romantic winds now and then shift direction.  I'm not going to spoil any of the pleasure of it by going into it here. Suffice it to say that the central attraction is the frequent quarreling between Serena and Rotherham, which surely owes as much to Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing as to Jane Austen.  In fact, Bath Tangle is in itself a quite extensive and entertaining vocabulary lesson, with most of the terms very effective insults which (who knows?) could come in handy someday.  A few examples:

"Sir, you are offensive!" declared Mr. Eaglesham, glaring at him. "I do not hesitate to tell you so!"

"Why should you? I don't hesitate to tell you that you're a muttonhead!"

Or how about:

"I thought he was such a twiddle-poop there wasn't the least harm in letting him go with us to the Gala night."

I'm not even sure I understand what this one means, but I'm certain it's insulting:

"It will be just as well for you if you stop thinking me a bleater, whom you can gull by pitching me your damned gammon!"

In an early scene, a character is "muttering animadversions against pretentious and encroaching old popinjays."  And then there are the ninnyhammers, the pigeon-hearted imbeciles, the marplots, and—my personal favorite—the addle-brained cawkers! 

Apart from the wide array of insults Heyer's vocabulary offers, I had to make Andy look up "ton" and "tonnish" on his cell phone.  Who knew that "ton" can also mean a fashion or trend?!  I thought it was a typo at first.  And I can't wait until the first opportunity (preferably at work) to say that something is "enough to send me into strong convulsions!"

(You can tell I had some fun with this…)

Although the mainstream reviewers quoted on the book's back flap (see pic) were cheerful about Bath Tangle, as a general rule Georgette Heyer and other writers of her ilk—"cozy" writers of rainy day reads, however brilliantly executed their works often are—have never garnered much critical or scholarly attention, even from scholars of the middlebrow such as Nicola Humble.  But that's kind of a shame, because I found that reading this novel in the context of Humble's definitions of the middlebrow was quite a fascinating experience.

I haven't read a lot of historical fiction of any variety, romance or otherwise, but it was striking for me to be reading a work set in the 1810s but to find in it so many of the concerns of its own time period, the 1950s.  For readers facing economically-limited lives in the postwar years, Serena's elegant acceptance of her reduced means (relatively speaking: she can't keep a whole stable of horses, only one—quelle tragédie!) would have made her more relatable, and Fanny's practical ability to manage her household and servants might have been a kind of ideal in itself for women who struggled to do the same.  Even Rotherham, stinking rich though he is, is presented as eschewing the pretensions of the upper class:

"Papa always held to it that with that upbringing, and all the toad-eating and nonsense that surrounded him when he was by far too young to perceive the folly of it, it said a great deal for his  character that he grew up to care so little for pomp and dignity, and of all creatures to dislike most those that flatter him. You will never see Ivo in company with any of the odious hangers-on who fawn on great men, administering all the time to their vanity, you know. He holds such stuff in utter contempt."

And the delightfully "vulgar" Mrs. Floore is undoubtedly a comfortingly lowbrow figure, who even hilariously cuts the Marquis himself down to size when she finally meets him:

"It'll be more to the point if I don't mind him," observed Mrs. Floore, who was clearly in a belligerent mood. "You must excuse me staring at you, my lord, but I never did see such peculiar eyebrows! Now, I shouldn't wonder at it, Emma, my pet, if half the time you thought he was scowling at you it was nothing but the way his eyebrows grow, which he can't help, though, of course, it's a pity."

And if the middlebrow novel tends to flirt with bohemianism—walking the line between what was socially acceptable and what was deliciously outré—then here, too, is the wonderful scene in which Major Kirkby is shocked to come across Serena and Fanny discussing Caroline Lamb's scandalous novel about Lord Byron, Glenarvon (1816).  He is first horrified to learn that it was the Marquis who sent Serena a copy of the book, and they argue about that.  Then just a few minutes later a letter from her Aunt Theresa arrives:

Suddenly Serena uttered a little crow of laughter. "Oh, Hector, you are utterly confounded! No, no, don't look so stiff! It is the funniest thing! My aunt writes to tell me that she is sending me Glenarvon! She says I shall be aux anges over it!"

Not only is Serena sophisticated enough to delight in the scandalous book, but even her stodgier aunt is sharing her delight, and this might have lent Serena just the kind of bohemian glow that middlebrow readers seemed to wholeheartedly embrace.

But although Serena is the novel's ideal heroine—the one in whose shoes the novel's readers would probably most like to imagine themselves (well, I would anyway!)—Fanny is perhaps the more realistic, sympathetic character, a figure closer to the average reader's actual self.  She is a woman making the most of her limitations, and it's hard not to relate to her as well, particularly in the passage where she attempts to explain to the liberated, carefree Serena how a young girl might be forced into a marriage she doesn't want—an explanation that might shed a poignant light on her own marriage to Serena's elderly father:

She saw Fanny shake her head, and fold her lips, and said sharply: "This will not do! If there was any truth in these freakish notions of yours, she need not have accepted his offer!"

Fanny looked up quickly. "Ah, you cannot know—you don't understand, Serena!'"

"Oh, you mean that she dare not disobey her mother? Well, my love, however strictly Lady Laleham may rule her, it is not in her power to force her into a disagreeable marriage. And if she is in such dread of her, she must welcome any chance to escape from her tyranny!"

Fanny gazed at her wonderingly, and then bent over her embroidery again. "I don't think you would ever understand," she said mournfully. "You see, dearest, you grew up under such different circumstances! You never held my lord in awe. Indeed, I was used to think you were his companion rather than his daughter, and I am persuaded neither of you had the least notion of filial obedience! It quite astonished me to hear how he would consult you, and how boldly you maintained your own opinions—and went your own way! I should never have dared to have talked so to my parents, you know. Habits of strict obedience, I think, are not readily overcome. It seems impossible to you that Lady Laleham could force Emily into a distasteful marriage, but it is not impossible. To some girls—to most girls, indeed—the thought of setting up one's own will does not even occur."

First and foremost, however, Bath Tangle is a glorious lark.  If I don't feel compelled to immediately read all of Heyer's other 54 (!!) novels, I nevertheless have no doubt that I'll pick one up the next time I need to lose myself in a smart, funny, utterly entertaining frolic of a novel.  In fact, if I'm not mistaken, Cotillion, written around the same time, has been waiting patiently on my Kindle since the time a year or two ago when the publisher offered it up as a free ebook.  So no doubt the temptation will grow to dive into that one—also considered one of Heyer's best.

And I have promised Tom, a regular reader of the blog and fellow DES-sie, that this Christmas season I will not forget to finally read Heyer's mystery Envious Casca, set at Christmas time and a favorite re-read to get into the Christmas spirit.  (It's probably because of the dysfunctionality of my own family that Christmas and murder seem to go quite logically together!)

I also wonder if any of you brilliant readers have ever gotten your hands on one of Heyer's early, autobiographical novels—Instead of the Thorn (1923), Helen (1928), Pastel (1929), and Barren Corn (1930)—which Heyer reportedly later tried to suppress.  If my information is correct, these are not historical or mysteries, but have contemporary settings and make use of events in Heyer's own life.  It appears that one or more of these may have been reprinted after Heyer's death, but they still aren't easy to track down.  I wonder if they're worth seeking out?