Civil Contract and Heyer

This in my opinion definitely Heyer’s best novel.  In fact as some have said, it is not really a “regency romance” at all but a “real serious piece of fiction.”

Heyer’s plot of a convenient marriage between a rich Cit and an impoverished aristocrat has now been copied by many other writers in the regency genre, but she did it first and with so much depth and reality without sacrificing some of her usual wit and charm.  There is also good laugh out loud fun in the gloriously  OTT Mr Chawleigh, Jenny’s merchant father who is shrewd, vulgar, and warm hearted and kindly, but with awful taste in clothes etc... with one exception. His love of fine china.

Heyer sets up a scenario where Adam’s late father has dissipated the family fortune and to save his home and help out his mother and sisters, he has a chance to marry money, the daughter of a wealthy merchant. Jenny is plain and shy and at times awkward, and she is the friend of Julia, the beautiful and foolishly sensitive daughter of Lord Oversley who is Adam’s first love.  Heyer takes us through their first year of married life, the birth of their first child, Giles and Adam’s lucky break when he makes some money speculating on the Stock Market, over Waterloo…

There are ups and downs, occasional quarrels and both sides have to adjust.  Jenny grows to love Fontley, the family country house and finds a useful role for herself there, managing the house and gardens, visiting the tenantry and assisting Adam with his plans for the farms. Adam begins to realise that Julia is too silly and spoiled and over emotional to be much help to him in his life as a farming landlord and that her faints and dramas would soon irritate him. And as he generously says she would find him a dead bore as a husband because he would not have been very romantic.

Heyer does have two other novels where there is a certain similarity of theme, where 2 women friends are from different backgrounds and are very different in temperament, but are rivals for the same man. in Devil’s Cub. Mary Challoner, the pretty but not beautiful daughter of a Cit has had a school friendship with the flighty Juliana Marling, who is pretty, dazzling, flirty and form an aristocratic background.  Mary is one of the sensible heroines who win the heart of Lord Vidal by being calm and  practical, when he abducts her.  Juliana, who is Vidal’s cousin, drives him mad with her dramatics.  She has fallen out with her admirer, Frederick Comyn, who then proposes to the sensible Mary…to rescue her from a difficult state of affairs, where she is almost forcedto marry Vidal, , and Juliana becomes jealous!

This mixing and matching all ends happily because the tone is lighter In Heyer’s earlier books.

Similarly in Friday’s Child, Lord Sherringham, a good natured but immature young man, is in love with Isabella Milborne a recognised “Beauty” who is rather spoiled but essentially good natured.  He asks her to marry him but she refuses -and in a temper he swears he’ll marry the first woman he sees.  He is partly driven by practical motives, because he will not come into full control of his estates for another 2 years unless he marries.  So he marries the young and naïve Hero Wantage, who is inexperienced in society, but is a neighbour of Sherry and Isabella and has been childhood friends with both of them.

 It isn’t quite the same situation as Civil Contract, since in Contract both Jenny and Julia in their ways genuinely love Adam... and are both a bit saddened by the fact that their friendship is damaged by their feelings for him.  Julia marries another man, whom she is very fond of, and will probably grow to love him, because he understands of her dramatic nature.

 Whereas Isabella is not in love with Sherry;  she is fond of him, and he of her, but she knows that her real love is for George Wrotham, his friend, who is not very rich. So in the end, Sherry realises that he was never really in love with Isabella, that he does love his wife and she loves him.Isabella finally admits that she loves George, and marries him.  It’s a happy ending, with a lot of comedy.  Sherry and Hero have their ups and downs, settling into marriage, as Hero is so naïve that she makes a lot of mistakes, unlike Jenny Chawleigh.  However, there is less realism in Friday’s Child, like most of Heyer’s earlier works. 

But Civil Contract is realistic and it’s none the worse for that.  We see the difficulties of marriage, especially one where the couple don’t know each other well, and only one of them is in love. We see the problems of Adam’s feeling “bought” by Mr Chawleigh, but his development of a gradual affection and admiration for the man.  And his sadness at giving up the life of a soldier which he loved and settling down to improving his estate.  We see Jenny’s finding a satisfactory role in helping to run Fontley, and make it comfortable and pleasant to live in, and preserving some of the historical beauty.  But she also is at times bewildered by the ways and thoughts of her new family as when Charlotte says that the Deverils love Fontley even for its very shabbiness, whereas her attitude is that if you love a place, you want to make it better and smarter looking.

It is funny in places but Heyer is able to fit in the realities of people’s psychology, the inconsistencies, the way we love and hate at the same time... Or have moments of anger against the people we love…I love the earlier stories, where Heyer tries out the situation of 2 friends and their being rivals and being friends from different classes. And I feel that both Friday’s Child and Civil Contract handle the situation beautifully in different ways.