[hildea]

Thanks for linking to this article! I like Heyer's books, and strongly disliked Fry's praise of them -- I've enjoyed writing everything I didn't like about it!

My main impression of this article is that it's immensely snobbish. I suspect that Fry had a crisis of "Oh no, I like some romance novels! I must explain why these romance novels are vastly superior to all those other romance novels, or I'll get romance cooties!"

He hates all Heyer covers: They are appalling, disgusting, and trashy.
Huh. Mostly they look just fine to me. Of course, most of them show that the novels are romance novels, with images of couples or a single protagonist in a romantic setting. The people are all fully clothed, mostly in period-appropriate clothing, no heroes with bare chests or heroines with artfully ripped bodices. I wonder what Fry finds so disgusting about them?

Her stories satisfy all the requirements of romantic fiction, but the language she uses, the dialogue, the ironic awareness, the satire and insight – these rise far above the genre.

Sigh. No, they don't "rise far above the genre". Allowing for Sturgeon's law (90% of everthing is dreck), there's a lot of romance that's on Heyer's level or better. It's perfectly possible to praise Heyer's language, dialogue etc without talking down a whole genre, and he's betraying his ignorance of the genre when doing it.

But there is another style of literary historical fiction whose project it is to research and reproduce the airs, modes and everyday details of a period with so much authenticity that you might almost be reading an author of that age. Georgette Heyer stands as first among equals in this approach.

Really? Her books show Heyer's version of the regency. Maybe it was well researched by the standards of historical novels written at her time, but Fry's claim is vastly exaggerated. (Compare Austen - who was contemporary with the regency - with Heyer, or read studies about Heyer like this one ("Her famous "Regency slang" is Heyer's own creation") or this one.)

...Bridgerton and other less strait-laced and tightly bodiced dramas and novels can give us the style of the Regency without its abominable injustices and stifling hierarchies, and with lots of extra romping and fizz..

I have only watched the first two episodes of Bridgerton, and I haven't read the books, but even that small sample was amply full of injustices and hierarchies. A lot of modern historical romance novels show these. Many of them do, like Heyer, show the world from the viewpoint of the upper classes, and the hierarchy is simply given, not shown as problematic, or at most shown as problematic when its victims are white upper class women. Despite its shortcomings, this kind of book can be quite fun to read.
Other authors engage with the injustices and hierarchies in a thoughtful way, and use the setting consciously in character development and plot. My favourite historical novels do this.

Heyer has plenty of what romance readers affectionately call crazysauce: Babies switched at birth, deathbed marriages, stolen government documents, murder, hidden treasure, secret passages, dashing smugglers, unexpected heirs, mistaken identities, women masquerading as men and vice versa, elopements, kidnappings, carriage chases, blackmail, duels, and dramatic revelations of sinister secrets. So what's this "extra romping and fizz" which mar modern romance novels, and which Heyer's novels are blessedly free of? I strongly suspect he's talking about sex. If anyone can see another way to interpret that part, I'd love to hear it.
And sure, not everybody like explicit sex scenes in their books. That's fine, obviously. There are a lot of novels, including modern romance novels, without explicit sex, just as there are a lot of them with it. It really rubs me the wrong way when a preference for either of those is described as superior, instead of just a matter of personal taste.

Fry writes a lot about how the regency was a turbulent time in history. I really like books which use the historical setting consciously. To take just one example: In Courtney Milan's Brothers Sinister series (victorian, not regency, but like Heyer historical romances centered around the upper classes in England) she uses the political upheaval around expanding voting rights, the controversies about Darwin's scandalous new theories, the legal vulnerabilities of women, and the difficulties of Indian people who want influence in the British empire as important drivers in her plots. Some of Heyer's books use the Napoleonic war, that's the only part of the turbulent time I can remember her using.

Those who read and wrote books of any kind (such was the tenor of the times) were almost exclusively those who owned land, or came from land and believed without thinking in birthright, noble blood, titles, dignities and hierarchies.

Hm, I'm not convinced he's right about either readers or writers, but even if he is, so what? Is he implying that modern authors who write as if they "believe without thinking in birthright, noble blood, titles, dignities and hierarchies" are superior to modern authors who write thinkingly about those aspects of society?

Fry ends with talking about the lack of films and TV series based on Heyer's books:

My own view is that her apparent unsuitability for dramatisation might be for the very reason that, while she may not be, or set herself up to be, an author of Great Literature, Georgette Heyer is nonetheless a writer, a real writer, whose gifts and glories reveal themselves most perfectly in the act of reading. If a new fad for the Regency age causes her to win new readers, then that is enough.

Implying that authors whose books have been dramatized are not "real writers" is absurd, and I'll mention Dickens, Austen, Atwood, and Tolkien as just a few counter-examples.