Charity Girl - Georgette Heyer #1970Club

I hadn't given the 1970 club much thought - works been busy and the commitments are stacking up, but mid week I had an idle look to see if Heyer had published anything - I knew it was towards the end of her life. 

She had, Charity Girl, though initially, I started reading Lady of Quality (1972) because I mixed them up. The later books are not Heyer's best, but having waded through Charity Girl I'm wondering if it's the worst book she ever wrote? There would certainly be an argument for it.

The faults are many - too much slang, endlessly repetitive, main characters who are essentially unappealing, and spend so little time on the page together that there's no sense of chemistry, a plot that doesn't make a great deal of sense, not much happens, and a complete lack of the humour that I associate with Heyer. She was elderly at this point, and not enjoying the best of health, and maybe that's why this one is such a stinker.

There are a couple of redeeming features - as Heyer gets older her heroines move out of their teens or very early 20s into their mid 20s and their are no more heros decades older than the lady. In this book there's a lot of discussion about a perfectly pleasant young woman - the charity girl of the title - who finds herself in a household of bullies. She runs away with the hope of finding a home with her grandfather, gets taken up by the hero who has briefly met her, and then deposited for safe keeping with his best friend and eventual love interest. But 1970 seems late for a discussion of how limited women's prospects were outside of marriage and as it goes, Cherry has found friends and we never feel like she won't be alright. 

Otherwise the characters are all well worn versions from previous books, and something that might have worked as a novella or a short story is dragged out to a tedious length. There's also an unpleasant kind of snobbishness running through the narrative about Cherry - her family is fairly awful, but that's not her fault, and frequent discussion about how it would be a disgrace to marry her and something the hero would never lower himself to do grates a little.

I'm not sorry I read it, apart from anything else it's a fair reminder that if this is where critics started it's no surprise they're critics, but there is something a little sad about seeing a writer I love at her worst.