Simon The Coldheart - Georgette Heyer #1925Club

I can't quite believe that Simon and Kaggsy's book club has been running for a decade now. I'm obviously getting old. 

1925 turns out to be the year Simon the Coldheart was written, and by chance, I was already reading it for a book group -  nothing but peer pressure would have persuaded me to pick it up otherwise but it comes with a point worth discussing. 

'Simon' is a fairly early work for Heyer, and one that she ended up suppressing in her own lifetime. In 1977, 3 years after her death, her son decided it was worth reprinting. The dedication is 'To the memory of my father', I assume Heyer's father, this one having been published not long before he died. It's possible that the dedication is written by her son and references her husband, 1925 was also the year they married and the physical descriptions of Simon suggest a degree of infatuation that might indicate they are a description of her husband to be. Or not.

Briefly, Simon is an illegitimate orphan who decides to make his way in the world by becoming squire to someone who reads like a pen portrait of Brian Blessed, decades before Brian Blessed was born. This goes well and he rises through the ranks, does well in battle and then foils a plot against Henry IV, which gets him a knighthood. Then he goes off to more war, becomes best friends with his half-brother and Henry V, behaves in heroic fashion whilst being the perfect soldier, finally falls in love with a French countess, kills some people, gets his girl, and we can hope lives happily ever after.

My friend, who chose this one for our reading group loves this book. I think it's terrible and can absolutely see why Heyer didn't want it to see the light of day again. Imagine breathless Shakespeare fan fiction laced with a good bit of hero worship, and the kind of descriptions of a man's body that even Jilly Cooper might have drawn the line at. It's not the worst thing I've ever read, and it has a couple of moments that indicate the writer she will become, but overall, Heyer was right. 

This then is the question, and an apt one in a week when another cache of Harper Lee's works have been released to a public that seems underwhelmed by the opportunity to read her juvenilia. Do we respect an author's decision and leave well alone, or do we let curiosity get the better of us?

I don't have a clear answer for myself on this, but on balance, I land on the side of leaving well alone. At least as far as my own reading is concerned. I think an author has the right to say this book embarrasses me now (as well this one might with its mangling of the English language) and to have that respected, but then my friend loves this with a passion, and who am I to argue with the pleasure it brings her? 

I'm even less sure of this now that the internet is full of fan fiction of variable quality which nonetheless people are getting the joy of creating and reading from. Maybe now a 23 year old Heyer would have honed her craft on AO3 and left her experimental stuff under a pen name, available to anyone prepared to snoop hard enough to dig them out. I like to think she would have, her early books are full of homages to all the things that must have influenced her as her own style developed. 

In conclusion - read at your own risk, and preferably with a group of like-minded friends who do not mind poking fun at a book whilst still respecting the dignity and taste of those who do genuinely have a love for it.