Manners, Money, and Marriage: Austen, Heyer, and the Literary Genealogy of the Regency Romance

Abstract

This chapter considers how the threat against women in Georgette Heyer’s Regency Buck (1935) can re-attune readings of social and sexual precarity in Jane Austen’s novels. When Heyer published Regency Buck, she was already well established as a historical novelist: Regency Buck marked her move into the field with which she is now primarily associated and which she is broadly considered to have originated. Heyer noted her debt to Austen, and Regency Buck references its Austenian lineage explicitly. Yet this is a novel in which the female protagonist is sexually assaulted by her guardian, the Earl of Worth, and is threatened with rape by two other suitors, including the Prince Regent. If Austen influences Heyer, then we must also think about how Heyer influences our reading of Austen. This complicates literary genealogies (in the Bloomian sense): rather than a hierarchal structure of influence, this chapter proposes a rhizomatic model of interconnectivities. How can the threat of sexual violence and women’s social precarity in Heyer be used to re-orient how Austen is read? Bringing these novels into a ‘back-and-forthness’ of a rhizomatic model of interconnectivities opens up new understandings of reading women’s writing, ones which consider how women’s social and sexual precarity is at the heart of manners, money, and marriage.