A Civil Contract

By -

A Civil Contract, by Georgette Heyer

 When I run into a Georgette Heyer novel I haven't read, I usually grab it and put it on the shelf for when I want a light, relaxing read.  I wasn't necessarily going to write a post about this story, but it turned out to be unusual for a Heyer Regency novel, and very interesting.

Captain Adam Deveril has been off fighting Napoleon in the Peninsular War, but upon the sudden death of his father, he becomes Viscount Lynton, owner of a landed estate and a truly astounding amount of debt.  His father, an optimist and big spender, has left everything neglected and heavily mortgaged too.  Adam needs to provide for his sisters and get his mother settled somewhere affordable, and it looks like he'll have to sell all of the family property to do it.  He and the enchanting Julia Oversley are madly in love, but their marriage is now out of the question.  Adam is left with a choice: he can sell everything (rendering his relatives miserable), or he can marry Jenny Chawleigh.  She's the daughter of a wealthy merchant, plain but practical and kind, and her ambitious father wants her to marry up.  Adam decides to sacrifice himself for the family -- partly to stop his little sister from trying to do it.

So Adam and Jenny marry.  Both are trying hard to navigate this marriage of convenience and be kind to each other.  Jenny sets out to be a comfortable and undemanding wife; she understands Adam's quirks, feeds him well, and never complains if he's late.  Adam chafes under the necessity of accepting money from a father-in-law who is very nice, but completely lacking in tact or taste.  How these two -- and their extended family and friends, even Julia -- find their places and fit their lives together makes for an enthralling tale that combines Heyer's comedy with more realism than is generally found in Regency romances.  It's more like domestic historical fiction than a standard romance.  Plus there's lots about Napoleon and other matters of the day.

I enjoyed it tremendously.  I always like a Heyer comedy, and was surprised to find this to be a little heavier and more realistic than usual, but that's an improvement to my mind.


Comments

  1. LoryJune 2, 2021 at 10:50 AM

    Yes, this was an interesting departure...it would have been nice to see more in this mode, but I think the demand for Regency fluffiness was high.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jenny @ Reading the EndJune 3, 2021 at 4:01 AM

    My mum really likes this book, but I found it so frustrating. They're so mean about Jenny's father, and I just! wanted them to find love. I am not going to Heyer for realism. :P (Also, I believe Rose Lerner's first novel, In for a Penny, is by way of being a reworking of A Civil Contract. If you're into that!)

    ReplyDelete
  3. CleoJune 3, 2021 at 10:51 AM

    Wow. I'm very curious as to how the relationships of Adam, Jenny and Julia settle. I haven't read this one but I'm going to look for it right now!

    ReplyDelete
  4. JeanJune 4, 2021 at 11:32 AM

    Mr. Chawleigh is a lovable and incredibly aggravating man! I thought that on the whole they did pretty well. And I think they did find love. They didn't find LOOOOVE!!1! (you have to sing that) but I don't think Adam and Julia would have been happy in the long run.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Joy Weese MollJune 9, 2021 at 10:49 AM

    I could see this working well for me in the right mood. It will help me to go in knowing not to expect the standard romance.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more