The Grand Sophy
Heyer virtually invented the Regency romance and wrote it better than anyone who followed her. Sophy Stanton-Lacy's cheerful disruption of the Rivenhall household is pure comedy of manners; her relationship with the furious Charles Rivenhall is the sparring-match romance at its wittiest and most satisfying.
The book's most damaging chapter is also its most remembered: Sophy pulls a pistol on the moneylender Goldhanger, and Heyer draws him as a stock antisemitic caricature that one reader calls a “horrible stereotypical Jewish moneylender character” and another a “gratuitously vicious bit of anti-Semitism.” The passage lands harder for arriving five years after the war and the full reckoning with the Holocaust; the Heyer estate reportedly resisted admitting it was a problem at all. Layer in a marriage plot between first cousins that plenty of modern readers find hard to get past regardless of period norms, plus a middle stretch some call simply wordy, and the charm asks a lot of patience. Even fans concede the ending crams too much into too little room, one flatly noting “things were solved too quickly.” Sophy herself never really changes, arriving and leaving exactly as certain of herself.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
