Growing up Regency-style

Sometimes, if I am asked why I spend my career thinking about the literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, I joke with more truthfulness than I care to admit that it is because of Georgette Heyer. For a period in my adolescence I would mark the beginning of the weekend by taking the bus into Oxford and heading for Blackwell’s Paperback Bookshop on Broad Street. Not for me the sparkly delights of Accessorize and Top Shop: instead my place of teenage safety was an under-the-stairs corner by two basement shelves filled with the uniform white spines of Heyer’s Regency romances.

I would sit on the shopfloor and work my way along, lovingly reading the blurbs title by title before selecting that week’s purchase. I can still remember the rustle as my chosen volume was slid into a fresh paper bag behind the till, and the joy of getting home, shutting my bedroom door and opening the bag. With a spine-fresh Georgette Heyer in my hands I was set fair until Monday morning, ready to fall headlong into a world of Empire-line dresses and hats and feathers and muslins and Regency slang. Arabella, Venetia, The Grand Sophy, These Old Shades, The Reluctant Widow, Friday’s Child: these novels and many more offered me uncomplicated joy and comfort during perplexing teenage years. Lots has changed in my life since then, of course, but Georgette Heyer has been a constant. I type this in the knowledge that there is currently a copy of Sylvester by my bed in case of a bout of insomnia. It wasn’t until I got to university that I realized Georgette Heyer had a model. She is sometimes thought to have taken inspiration from Jane Austen, in whose Regency world she was so at home. Austen, however, is less interested in the stuff of life than was Heyer: Austen’s heroines, by and large, are also a bit older and wiser. The affinity I saw most strongly as I started to read my way seriously through real eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century fiction was between Heyer and Frances (known as Fanny) Burney, author of four magnificent turn-of-the-century novels: Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla and The Wanderer. This summer, as I have reread Burney for the book I’m working on, I have been struck afresh by the realization that she is the real deal, especially for those who like their literary reading served with a hefty side-order of millinery. It’s important to say at the outset that Burney is not simply concerned with bonnets and silk shawls. Austen cited her as a foundational figure for women writers and readers in her famous defence of the novel form in Northanger Abbey; elsewhere the influence of Burney on Austen’s work is also clear. Individual episodes in Burney’s novels reappear in Austen’s in striking ways. An importunate suitor takes advantage of the close confines of a moving carriage in both Evelina and Emma; a heroine is inveigled into taking part in amateur theatricals against her will in both The Wanderer and Mansfield Park. Strikingly the phrase ‘pride and prejudice’ appears multiple times at the conclusion of Burney’s Cecilia. Burney writes with great skill about the precarious position occupied by young women trying to make their way in the world, so it is perhaps no wonder that her influence is so clear in the work of generations of independent-minded women writers who came after her. Her later novels are long and wordy and complicated, and getting back to them amid the noise of mid-life this summer has been a pleasure but has also required some stamina. Her first novel, however, is the most Heyer-ish of the bunch. Evelina’s subtitle is ‘The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World’ and it undeniably has its moments of shade as well as light. By and large, though, it is an escapist joy: a bravura performance by a shy young woman who kept the fact of her authorship a closely guarded secret. Evelina was published in 1778 when Burney was 26. She was the fourth child of Charles Burney and his wife Esther, who died when Burney was 10. Charles’s trade as a musician and music master placed the family on the fringes of smart London society. It was an ideal position for a bookish, writerly girl with acute powers of social observation. At 16 Burney started a journal addressed to ‘Dear Nobody’ and in Evelina (the only one of her novels written while she was completely unknown) she relished the freedom of anonymity as she pinned the people and the places of polite London down in print. Even her beloved father was not told that his daughter had turned novelist until the book was published, and to protect her identity she laboriously copied out her manuscript in a disguised hand before sending it to publishers. Once news that she was the author of Evelina emerged in literary circles, however, Burney found herself famous. One of the things to which she objected thereafter was the lazy assumption by some readers that the character of Evelina was little more than a paper-version of Burney herself. Evelina gets herself into a succession of scrapes and near-disasters, some through bad luck, others through bad judgement. The novel traces her early adventures in London as she moves between social groups and classes, discovering the dangers and seductions of Vauxhall Gardens, theatrical excursions, and carriage rides and country-house visits. Its plot is concerned with her efforts to discover the truth of her parentage which, when finally uncovered, enables her to make a respectable marriage to the novel’s rather dull hero, Lord Orville. But its pleasures have less to do with plot than with the brilliance with which Burney evokes the stuff and rhythms of society life. Evelina is an epistolary novel, which means that we experience the sights and sounds of Evelina’s world alongside her. ‘We have been a-shopping’, she writes in an early letter, ‘to buy silks, caps, gauzes, and so forth.’ (Burney was a great coiner of words and ‘shopping’ is one of many instances where she is thought to be among a particular word’s first originators.)

At the milliners [Evelina continues] the ladies we met were so much dressed, that I should rather have imagined they were making visits than purchases. But what diverted me was, that we were more frequently served by men than by women . . . they recommended caps and ribbands with an air of so much importance, that I wished to ask them how long they had left off wearing them.

Later in the same letter we are brought into the fold still further as we learn what it feels like to have one’s hair dressed, eighteenth-century style:

You can’t think how oddly my head feels; full of powder and black pins, and a great cushion on the top of it. I believe you would hardly know me, for my face looks quite different to what it did before my hair was dressed. When I shall be able to make use of a comb for myself I cannot tell for my hair is so much entangled, frizzled they call it, that I fear it will be very difficult.

This is all great fun but there is more on offer here than simply a comic account of living in a constrained eighteenth-century body. The ‘history’ of Evelina’s entrance into the world is the history of a young woman learning to hold on to her sense of self as she navigates the transition from child to adult. ‘Really’, she writes to her guardian, ‘I think there ought to be a book, of the laws and customs à-la-mode, presented to all young people upon their first introduction into public company.’ The idea that there are rules and customs to be put on like clothes and hairpieces in the transitional years of adolescence is evergreen. It is evident in the pages of Evelina, and in the novels of Georgette Heyer – and even in the homogeneous sparkliness of Accessorize and Top Shop from which the teenage me was hiding when I escaped to the basement of Blackwell’s. ‘Shopping’ in Evelina is an act of both conformity and self-expression. Stuff matters, Burney tells us. If you want to understand the social undercurrents of a world you have to start by understanding its relationship with hats and dresses and silks and fashions: in short, with the things the people in that world choose to consume and display. Evelina is not the first adolescent to wish for a book that tells her how to grow up and she is certainly not the last to make some mistakes along the way. Evelina endures as a period piece and a celebration of a Technicolor late eighteenth-century world that has been endlessly copied – by Austen, by Heyer and more recently, and with added sex, by the makers of Bridgerton. But it is also a book that is generous about extreme youth – about its uncertainties and failings, its peculiar desire both to fit in and to be oneself, its dreams and anxieties. Now I am the parent of a teenager myself I find it reassuring to be reminded that some aspects of growing up are timeless, even if others are fashion-dependent and historically particular. Burney would go on to write novels that have more caustic things to say about the way young women should and shouldn’t behave, and about the ways in which they should and shouldn’t be treated. Elements of those novels make more difficult reading in the twenty-first century, even as their historical and literary interest remains. As I reflect on this summer of rereading Burney, I keep returning to that moment in Northanger Abbey where Austen defends her own literary lineage. ‘Such is the common cant’, she writes:

‘And what are you reading, Miss –?’ ‘Oh, it is only a novel!’ replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. ‘It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.’

It’s not an accident that Austen reaches for two titles by Burney as she lays out her defence of the novel (incidentally Belinda, by Maria Edgeworth, is also a joy to read). Austen knew herself to be writing in a relatively new tradition, mapped and established by Burney and the women writers who followed her, in which the experiences of the young – and of young women in particular – were established as fit and right subjects for literature. In the ‘history’ of Evelina’s entrance to the world there is also the ‘history’ of that world itself: its preoccupations and fads, its manners and morals, its virtues and failings. Sometimes, Evelina’s example tells us, those who are on the periphery have the clearest view of social realities disguised by feathers and fashions and sparkle. And, as the work of Burney and Austen and Heyer attests, escaping into fiction – even the most escapist fiction – can reveal the world around you in new and endlessly surprising ways.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 90 © Daisy Hay 2026