Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Jane Aiken Hodge, in The Private World of Georgette Heyer (reissued in paperback May 2006), confirms that The Black Moth is Georgette Heyer's first book, published when she was 19, possibly written to entertain a younger brother who was often ill, and taken by her father's publisher not on account of his reputation as a scholar but for its own merit as a delightful story. In Moth the devoted Georgette Heyer fan finds the narrative elements that will become her hallmarks: deft characterization of the time period, lively dialogue, eccentric and determined characters who come alive on the page, and a superb prose style that proves highly readable (as another reviewer confirms, not for the length of words but for the graceful simplicity of her language).
Fans of the Heyer ouevre will also be amused to see their beloved author's first stabs at characters and situations she will deal so masterfully with later: the roguish hero who sets fashion but is never really within it; the gorgeous heroine with her superior taste and good sense; the villain who ends up earning reader sympathies (though through most of the book he is frankly detestable); the ladies of fashion with stunning attire and empty brains, and the gallants who woo them. There is definitely some swashbuckling, but the narrative resists, as Heyer always did, melodrama, as the last scene shows. I would hesitate to call this juvenalia; it is a character-driven, not a plot-driven work, an ambitious experiment for the romance (which was, at the time she published it, highly unfashionable, literarily speaking), and the reader can witness a writer who has already found her voice now finding her material. Heyer would revisit the devilish anti-hero many times, letting him triumph in These Old Shades (whether these are companion pieces are the reader's opinion; her letters suggest Heyer did not intend them to be) and following his progeny in Devil's Cub, just as she would revisit the same themes of courtship, marriage, the pitfalls of the idle rich, and the relentless judgments of elite society on personal situation.
As reading material, the book is highly engaging and completely satisfying; several love stories unravel at once, and the introductions of Fanny and Lavinia are sheer narrative genius; in the span of a page, Heyer lightly sketches a character who emerges whole and vibrant and entirely dedicated to her own pursuits, whatever they may be. And who cannot adore the courtship scene where Jack, painfully wounded in the rescue of Diana and recovering at her house, is first properly introduced to the lady in question by having her command him to help her sort silks and dumping a basket of colorful threads over his earlish knee? As a romance, the book may show a failure to focus at length on the developing relationship between hero and heroine (for certain the 'secondary' characters often edge them out in wit and color), but as a novel with romantic elements, telling an entertaining story of the attractions and perils of upper-class English society during the Georgian period, it succeeds; and, as a Heyer, it cannot disappoint.
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The Black Moth was the first novel by Georgette Heyer. It's a romance set around 1750.
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