The Young Bluestockings discuss Cotillion by Georgette Heyer

Well, how did you like it?

I thought this book would be perfect for discussion on Nineteenteen for a couple of reasons.

• The heroine, Kitty Charing, is one of Heyer’s ingenue heroines, very young but certainly not lacking in spunk. She’s never been to London, so we get to view the city and the Season through her eyes. We get a mini-course on the amusements of fashionable London—Almack’s, the Egyptian Hall in Bullock’s Museum, the Elgin Marbles (didn’t you love the bit in Chapter 11 where Freddy complains about them to his father?)—and not-so-fashionable London—shopping at Grafton House and public masquerade balls at the Opera House and Pantheon.


• We get a look at the manners and etiquette around courtship and marriage of the time (a word of warning here—though Heyer frequently uses the device, engagement announcements were NOT published in the newspapers—only marriages were.)


• We get bad boys of a couple of different stripes in Jack and Camille, and of course the difference between true gentlemen and not-so-true ones in Jack and Freddy.

Ah, Freddy. Some Heyer aficionados have speculated that Heyer was poking fun at herself and her previous books by having the unpromising Freddy as her romantic lead in this book…but I'm not so sure. To me Freddy is a representation of how love can transform a person: he goes from being rather foolish and dim-witted, if gentlemanly, at the beginning, and ends up being the one to solve, gently and with a minimum of fuss, all the tangles Kitty has wrought upon her friends’ (and her own) affairs. Freddy’s father Lord Legerwood is a fascinated witness to the changes Freddy goes through, saying to Kitty, “I like Freddy’s engagement very well, you know. It has done him a great deal of good.” When Freddy tells Kitty at the end of the book, “…Thought you was in love with him [Jack]. Don’t mind telling you it was as much as I could do to keep a still tongue in my head when he asked you to marry him. What I mean is, like you to have everything you want. Wished it was me, and not Jack, that’s all,” it’s terribly romantic, despite Freddy’s characteristically telegraph-like delivery. After Freddy’s not very prepossessing first appearance in Chapter 3, Heyer begins almost immediately after his and Kitty’s engagement to drop clues that he may be hero material after all: first we see even his self-important cousin Lord Biddenden follows his lead in fashion...then we see his kind heart as he cleverly figures out how to bankroll Kitty’s wardrobe without embarrassing her…then we see how well-liked he is in society because of his perfect manners and deportment…and onward through the book until, at the end, he truly is a hero. I think he’s probably one of Heyer’s best-drawn romantic leads.

And what wonderful characters—clueless Meg and her terrible color sense (oh, the lilac gown!), the ravishing but equally clueless Olivia and her awful mother, the sardonic but kindly Lord Legerwood. I especially enjoyed the few scenes between Lord Legerwood and Freddy, showing Lord L.’s growing respect for his firstborn.

The book does have flaws. Poor Dolph got a little monotonous, though of course that was the point…I think it might have been nice to somehow show how living quietly in the country with his horses made him much better able to function coherently, to contrast with his confusion in town. And not to cross too far into applying today’s sensibilities to the past, but at times I couldn’t help squirming a little at how a character with intellectual challenges was depicted…except that the fact he could live a happy, productive life in the right atmosphere was an important plot point. The pacing was a little slow at first—the beginning chapters set at Arnside House rather dragged, I thought, though Mr. Penicuik and Miss Fishguard were both delightfully awful in their own ways. But the action picked up once it moved to London, and simmered pretty nicely after that.

On the whole, Cotillion is one of my top five Heyers, along with The Grand Sophy, Frederica, The Unknown Ajax, and Arabella. How about you? Did you find any of the Regency references or vocabulary confusing, or was it on the whole pretty readable? If this was your first Heyer, do you think you'll read more?

Discussion is now open!