The world's own optimist

On Saturday, I went with two good friends to the Rereading Georgette Heyer conference at Lucy Cavendish College, and very good it was too. Apparently – and remarkably, to my mind – it is the first conference to be devoted to Heyer’s works. I think there were around 80 of us in attendance, and the conference organizers had sadly had to close bookings.

The highlight of the day for me was the short talk given by Jennifer Kloester, author of Georgette Heyer’s Regency World, who has spent the last few years researching a new biography of Heyer. She spoke with great knowledge about and empathy for her subject, and I think it’s going to be a first-rate book.

I thoroughly enjoyed Sam Rayner’s paper on the changes in cover design, from the elegant hardback covers to later, more lurid papers promising excitement, adventure and really wild things! This paper also revealed how Heyer seems to have shifted category from being perceived as an historical to a romance writer over time: many of the attendees had picked up their mother’s copies, but a handful said it was their fathers who had read Heyer.

I also very much liked Sarah Annes Brown’s paper “Lady of Quality and Homosexual Panic”, which used Kosofsky Sedgwick to look at the anxieties about lesbianism that surround Annis Wychwood’s relationship to her cousin Miss Fowler, and her young protegee, Lucilla. When I read the book last month, I was puzzled as to why the relationship between Lucilla and Ninian seems to fade away towards the end: however, as Sarah Brown noted, anxieties about lesbianism disappear as soon as Carleton puts in an appearance. So Lucilla has served her plot purpose.

We rather sweetly ended on a very fannish note: a songvid to “Holding out for a Hero” using clips from recent film and TV adaptions of Austen, Gaskell, Bronte, etc. Unfortunately, I can only find a version without audio on YouTube, there seems to have been some copyright complaint over the song.

Tags: georgette heyer