1968 was an eventful year - the Vietnam war, Prague spring, huge student riots in Paris, assassination of Martin Luther King, the Cold War rumbling on in the background, and Rosemary's Baby showing in cinemas. It's also towards the end of Heyer's life and writing career, she died in 1974, and a long time since she published her first book in 1921.
Her later books are not generally considered her best, not least because she piles in a lot more slang, and in the case of 'Cousin Kate' there's a lot less of her trademark humour as well. That I have a fondness for it at all is because it's set in Leicestershire- her fictional Staplewood is somewhere near the real Market Harborough (just down the road, and still a charming market town, the Angel coaching in that she mentions is still in business too).
Cousin Kate is 24, unmarried, bought up following the drum with her military father across Spain and Portugal, orphaned, penniless, not especially well educated, and very pretty. The respectable occupation open to her is as a governess, but she's too young, too pretty, and not well enough qualified to to find a job easily. When we meet her she's just been sacked after her employers brother made a pass at her.
She's staying with her old nurse looking for any kind of work, when Sarah (the nurse) decides to contact Kate's half aunt in the hope that she'll do something for the girl. What she does is turn up, sweep her away to Staplewood, and keep Kate there with her much older invalid husband, and her disturbingly volatile son, Torquil.
It's clear from the beginning that all is not well with Torquil, it's so long since I first read this book that I can't remember when we're meant to work out that he's insane but there's a brooding gothic atmosphere from the beginning that makes the mood of this book radically different from Heyer's other romances.
I'm going to skate over Torquil's madness and the way Heyer depicts it, and simply accept that she wants him to be both genuinely menacing, but also an object of compassion. I'm more interested in her decision to set the action some years after Waterloo becaus I think it's telling that Kate came unscathed through her experiences following an army across Europe, but meets real danger in peace time. It certainly seems to reflect the uncertainties of the late 1960's.
Happily, Kate meets and falls in love with Philip, Torquil's cousin. So she doesn't have to dwell on the bleak picture her aunt paints when she tries to persuade Kate to marry her son and provide an heir for the estate before he has to be committed. We can dwell on it a bit though because this is one of the things I find particularly interesting about Heyer.
Her father died when she was quite young, at which point she supported her family with her writing. She continued to support her brothers throughout their lives, and when her husband decided to retrain as a barrister it was the money that Heyer earned that payed for that and kept her family afloat. She certainly knew plenty of other successful women writers who must have essentially have been doing the same thing, and given the time she lived in must have known plenty of other capable, successful, women. She would also have seen those jobs go back to men after both world wars.
Even in 1968 the expectation would have been that most women would leave work when they married, and that marriage was a suitable career for a nice middle class girl. (My mother, born in 1950, got the sort of education that prepared girls to be efficient wives for professional men, rather than to have careers - there was no expectation or encouragement at all to go to university, or to dream of any sort of career as far as I can tell.) From a strictly practical point of view Kate could do worse than marry Torquil (provided he didn't strangle her on the wedding night) he could be quietly hidden away in fairly short order, leaving her to enjoy wealth and security in peace for the rest of her days.
Not all of Heyer's attitudes stand up to close scrutiny (she can be a snob, some find her high Tory attitude troublesome, she does occasionally sound distinctly anti-Semitic) but I don't doubt that she's making the point that women were still getting a pretty raw deal in the career stakes when she wrote this, and that it wasn't good enough. She even makes it clear that whilst Aunt Minerva is the villain of the piece, she's also in her way the victim of a bad marriage. A strong willed, ambitious, woman has married a weak man because it's the only option she had. He's given her little scope for her abilities, and wilfully ignored the tragedy unfolding in his own family (he warns Kate not to trust her aunt, but offers her no practical assistance). Minerva may be a cold and selfish woman but I'd argue that Heyer depicts her ambition as a positive attribute, albeit one that's disastrously misdirected.
I'm pleased to have had the push to reread this one. It will never be my favourite Heyer, but thinking about it against the background of when it was written has certainly made me reassess it, and I've found a much more interesting book than I expected.
I love that Heyer is the gift the keeps on giving for every club year - and every time I say that I'll read one one day!
ReplyDeleteShe really is, in so many ways. I've always loved her books, but your book clubs have made me think more about the length of her career as a popular novelist, and how she reflects the decades she writes in. When I first read these it wasn't in chronological order, and although you can spot the later ones, partly because the tone is often darker, I gave no thought to why that might be.
ReplyDeleteLike Simon, I really must read a Heyer at some point. I find what you say about the idea that women should be prepared to be efficient wives interesting because I was born a year before your mother and that wasn't my experience at all. At least two thirds of my year went on to university or teacher training college, all of us with the idea of having a career in mind and most of us from very working class backgrounds. Perhaps our different experiences reflect the fact that this was very much a period of change.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely. I think my mother was quite unlucky. Her father made his money as a builder just after the war, he was from a very working class background and had aspirations, so his elder daughters went to a school that would match those. They learnt Greek dancing and deportment, played a lot of sport, how to hem handkerchiefs (exquisitely) and how to hire and fire staff along with the usual other bits. It can't have been a system that survived much beyond her time, and she would have been much better served by a good comprehensive or grammar school. As it was she got married at 21, which I think we'd consider young now, and whilst she was very much in love, looking back she also says it was a way to get out of home - for me that was University. I don't think her experience was particularly unusual even though things were changing fast.
DeleteWhen I look at this Heyer heroine I see a young woman who is intelligent and capable, but has limited options, the romance is almost incidental- you could imagine that Heyer would really have liked to have given her a great job instead, but that's not what would sell, so it has to be a husband. When she wrote about the books she wrote it was with a certain amount of contempt and impatience for their subject matter, which further convinces me that she's often deliberately subversive in the way she handles things.
I find her genuinely fascinating, I've grown up with these books, and they're almost unique in terms of how often I've re read them - far more than almost anything else, and certainly more consistently over a number of years than anything else, and she still constantly surprises me. She's an easy writer to mock, but worth reading with an open mind.
I re read this recently and enjoyed it more than I thought I would. I will take no truck from anybody about GH I think she is a great writer
ReplyDeleteSo did I, and so do I. She was a remarkable woman in so many ways and I love her books (literally to bits)
ReplyDeleteI read this one also and did enjoy it, thought it wasn't what I was expecting! Heyer's books are nearly always fun and diverting but I'm also intrigued to read more about her own life. I have Jennifer Kloester's bio and really hope to get to it soon.
ReplyDeleteHer life is interesting, and whilst I have no idea what kind of person she actually was I'm always surprised at how much hostility she can attract. She clearly was a bit of a snob, and her high Tory politics are a sticking point for some - but there's nothing unusual in either. Her depictions of Jewish characters are uncomfortable now, but reflect the prejudices of her age and upbringing, and I've always found them easy to ignore. I found I enjoyed this book much more, and found more in it, thinking about it in the context of the year it was written.
DeleteI hadn't thought about the context of the publishing date when I was reading it but it does make sense. I've read about 10 of her books now and didn't really notice any anti-Semitism, maybe it wasn't obvious in the books I read. I did start reading Angela Thirkell recently and noticed anti-Semitism right away which is such a needle scratch in this day and age. It does take away somewhat of my enjoyment of the book which I really like so far.
DeleteHeyer has some Jewish money lenders who conform to some dodgy stereotypes but it's not something that comes up particularly often. I've found Thirkell much more jarring, but it's also interesting, and quite encouraging, to see prejudices that were common place not so very long ago are now shocking.
DeleteWhat I gathered from Heyer's biography is that she had ambitions to be taken much more seriously as a historian, but that in the end it was the historical romance that sold (she suppressed a few contemporary novels she wrote, and one historical romance so must have felt quite strongly about them) so they were what she wrote. I hadn't thought much about the difference between the romances a young woman would write in the 1920's and 1930's, the Ines a middle aged woman would write in the 1940's and '50's, and a considerably older woman in the 1960's but I guess both her age and the society around her must be reflected in her books one way or another. I need to put them all in order now.
What a sensitive and interesting reading of this, Hayley! I never much liked this one because it absolutely wasn't what I was expecting of a Heyer (light, amusing) and Torquil made me feel very queasy (both because Heyer meant me to, and because of the way she depicted him). But I'm completely re-thinking it in the light of what you've written.
ReplyDeleteThank you, that's a really nice thing to read about myself! This won't ever be my favourite Heyer, but I don't think it's a big reach to assume that the time she was writing had an impact on the content of the book, and thinking of it in that way certainly changed how I saw the book. It seems stupid now, but I'd never really considered how long her writing career was, or what was happening around her. As a young reader I was aware of the change in tone between the early and later books, but clearly didn't give it any real thought.
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