When Sir Horace Stanton-Lacy is ordered to South America on Diplomatic Business he parks his only daughter, Sophy, with his sister in Berkeley Square. Forward, bold, and out-spoken, Sophy sweeps in and immediately takes ton by storm.
Upon her arrival, Sophy can see that her cousins are in a sad tangle: Ceclia is in love with a poet, Charles is engaged to a dour bluestocking, her uncle is of no use at all, and the younger children are in desperate need of some fun and freedom. They all need her help and it’s providential that Sophy arrives when she does.
The Grand Sophy, by Georgette Heyer
How does one even go about reviewing a Georgette Heyer book? She’s regarded as the mother of Regency romances and for good reason, in my opinion. Her books fall into the category of ‘clean’ romance in that it is rare for the hero and heroine to kiss.
But really, her books fall into a category all their own, where the romance is subtle, the dialog both archaic and witty, and the characters far more opaque than those found in a modern romance novel. There are signs of the times she wrote them in — for example, it’s hard to believe that the sadly casual anti-Semitic characterization that shows up at one point in this book would be acceptable to an editor today. Likewise, the fact that the heroine and hero are first cousins can be a turn-off for a lot of modern readers.
Still, if you wanted me to name one book that was my favorite to go back and reread in the Regency category, this would be it. I didn’t discover Heyer’s books until I was in graduate school and The Grand Sophy wasn’t my first — that honor goes to Frederica. But on a trip to Germany for a short course, I stopped by an English language bookstore and picked up the Heyer book I didn’t recognize. This means I have incredibly fond memories of the story unfolding over an afternoon in Salzburg.
The heart of this book is Sophy. She has grown up abroad with her father, a diplomat, and as such has been given an unusual degree of freedom. She knows the conventions of polite society and exactly how far she can push things and she’s not afraid to do so when she thinks it will help the people around her be happier. That’s certainly the situation she finds when she moves in with her aunt because her father is being sent on a diplomatic mission to Brazil — the household is in a fine mess and someone needs to straighten them all out. Fortunately for them, that’s just the sort of thing Sophy excels at.
I hesitate to say anything more because part of the joy of this book is the first discovery. Some elements will be familiar to any reader of Regency novels but it feels like they are distilled to their purest essence here, in part because they weren’t tropes at the time this book was written. As you would expect for a romance, all turns out right in the end. Sophy’s visit might leave one feeling confused and bewildered, but it will also leave one’s life immeasurably better — and it will ultimately be your own decisions that make it so because Sophy achieves her aims making the end result of one’s choices clear.
Of course I love the other characters are well. In my opinion, this book is Heyer at her best and if you can get past the relationship between Sophy and Charles, there is so much to enjoy here. Every reread is just as wonderful; the only thing I regret is that I can’t read it again for the first time. It’s not perfect and I don’t want to gloss over the anti-Semitic characterization of the moneylender in the book in particular (more-so than the cousins, that is the one thing that makes me cringe every reread), but it still one of the books that I can’t get enough of. If you haven’t read it already, do yourself a favor and enjoy one of the classics the genre has to offer.