When Lydia quickly sees through his fortune-hunting motives, Julius proposes an alliance. He will help secure her future if she helps him secure Clara's heart.
But Lydia is not all she appears to be, and she has a plan of her own: to teach him a lesson he won't soon forget. But her scheming soon leads to unforeseen consequences for them both.
Can love spring from deception?
There are so many hallmarks and tropes associated with regency/historical romance and almost all of them can be traced back to the author Georgette Heyer who’s commonly considered to essentially be the mother of the genre. Her first book was published in 1921 when she was only nineteen, and she continued writing until her death in 1974. We wouldn’t have Bridgerton today, if not for Georgette Heyer!
So much of what we expect to see in the genre is thanks to Heyer and her books. From beloved plot elements to the very language so often used. There’s a lot of words that, if you read regency romance, you’ll be familiar with. For example, when characters talk about ‘the ton’ or ‘the quality’, it’s thanks to Georgette Heyer.
She did extensive historical research but put that research together in a unique way. She collected accurate, real slang, but the final result was accidently creating her own dialect. It’d be like if someone 100 years from now took slang from TikTok, rap music, and Boston, put it all together into one book and had all the characters speaking that way, and then everyone started thinking that how they really spoke in the 2020’s. Those individual pieces of slang are not wrong…but it’s also not exactly right. It wasn’t the common vernacular, and people didn’t use it all jumbled up together like that in day-to-day conversation.
I’ve read so much Heyer at this point that that language sometimes accidentally ends up slipping into my own speech, confusing anyone who hears it. I’ve told my mother someone was ‘doing it much too brown’ (making an exaggeration) and told my brother something was a ‘real bouncer’ (a lie).
A few more of my favorite Heyer-isms include:
Blunt (money)
To wish someone at Jericho (to want them to go away)
Being half-sprung (to be tipsy)
Become a tenant for life (to marry)
I think the language is such an important component of the genre as it captures the sense of being in another time, place, and culture. It’s the building blocks of another world that is delightful to step into and explore.
He fetched them both a glass. “Now, tell me. How goes our business?”
“Do we have a business? I thought we had a scheme.”
“Business sounds more honorable.”
“Do you care about honor?”
He frowned and opened his mouth to retort, and then noticed her expression. Her voice might be serious, but her face was laughing, and her eyes glinted gaily. She was, he thought, very hard not to laugh along with. And so he did. “Touche,” he said. “Scheme it shall be.”
“Well then, our scheme is going quite nicely. Clara was in raptures over your care of William and Margaret. She said she had never known a man could have such a natural affinity with children.”
He grimaced. “Maybe as a rule we can’t, but we can have a natural affinity with rogues and ruffians and those two were equal parts of both.”
“I wouldn’t tell her that,” she replied thoughtfully. “It would probably not go over very well.”
“She can’t actually think those children are well behaved?”
“She thinks they are naturally high-spirited and that high spirits in children must not be checked.”
“William at least, if not checked, is likely to end up on the gallows. Margaret may even join him there. And I shall watch with pleasure.”
Born in Taipei, Taiwan, Naomi Laeuchli has lived overseas in nine different countries on three different continents where her family was posted with the American Foreign Service. In November 2012 she moved from the Democratic Republic of the Congo back to the states and currently lives in Arizona with five horses. She works as a freelance writer and part time at the local library. She has written several interactive stories for Choice of Games, Tales, and Dorian.
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We appreciate you featuring THE SCHOOLMASTER'S DAUGHTER today.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for having me on your blog this morning!
ReplyDeleteA pleasure! And thank YOU for those fun ye olde timey slang words...I'm slowly working them into my vernacular :)
DeleteGood! The more other people start using them, the less weird I’ll be when I let them slip out :-D
DeleteSounds like a good story.
ReplyDeleteThank you! Hope you get a chance to enjoy it!
DeleteHeh, I did not mean to make that comment as ‘anonymous’. How very mysterious that made it seem!
DeleteThanks for the guest post & excerpt! :)
ReplyDeleteHope it was an interesting read!
DeleteThank you again so much for having me on your blog today!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the great excerpt. The book sounds wonderful. Love the pretty cover.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much! When I found the cover, I bought it before I was even finished with the book because it was exactly what I wanted and had already spent sometime searching for.
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