Bath Tangle - Georgette Heyer

I have a gross cold which has done nothing for my weekend plans (spend time with husband, catch a bunch of comedy festival gigs, finish some of the many books I've read 3/4s of and then abandoned). I think I might be in the process of finally learning the patience to sweat onions properly - I'm craving onion soup with lots of garlic, but it doesn't feel like much of an achievement when it;s as much as I can concentrate on. 

The Georgette Heyer Readalong that was such a lockdown lifeline has partly migrated to Signal as a chat group, but we have recently resurrected the group read with Bath Tangle - 3 chapters a week with an hour or so chatting on the night and then the odd opinion shared throughout the week. It's a really good format for a dozen or so people to slowly read and discuss a book. We know each other well enough to be open to a range of disagreements on characters. We also all love Georgette Heyer's books even if we don't love all of her books equally which helps keep things friendly. 

Bath Tangle was nobody's favourite going in and probably isn't going out either, but I enjoyed the slow read much more than I expected to and like the book more for it. It opens at a funeral with 2 young women waiting for the men to join them. The younger of the two turns out to be a late Earl's widow, the other his daughter. The Earl we swiftly concluded was a bit dodgy, first for marrying a woman younger than his daughter, and secondly for leaving his 25-year-old daughter's financial future tied up in the hands of her ex-fiance. 

What follows is a book that has a whole lot of characters trying their best not to hurt each other, financially controlled by one another, scared of various mothers, and overall demonstrating how vulnerable women's lives were to the men around them. It was written in 1955 when a woman wouldn't have been able to get a mortgage, or any kind of bank loan without a male guarantor and would still have been expected to leave work when she married. 

The emotional entanglements continue to complicate themselves (In Bath) very much in the manner of a drawing room comedy - and this would make an excellent stage play, before suddenly resolving in mostly satisfactory ways. We all agreed that we didn't think much of the main characters, but that their often appalling behavior was all too easy to believe in - and that's the genius of Heyer. Every character feels fleshed out and feasible. When they behave badly we understand why, we also get a fun dissection of how not everyone is suited - one woman's hero might be another villain.

Given the relatively limited education and employment options for a lot of girls even in the 1950s, as well as the social stigma of divorce it's interesting to see Heyer's evident distaste for marriage between very young women and much older, richer men. Yes, they offer financial and social security, but there's a cost.