The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer

[meganbmoore]

Sophy Stanton-Lacy has spent the last several years traveling around Europe with her father, who is a diplomat, and keeping him away from women looking for a husband. But when her father is sent to South America, Sophy goes to stay with her aunt and her family. There, she finds that her cousin Cecilia wants to marry a poet instead of the more reliable man her family has chosen, her cousin Hubert has developed a gambling problem, and her cousin Charles is engaged to a bluestocking the entire family dislikes. Sophy, naturally, sets out to set everything right.

This is a book that I found to be very entertaining, but I’m not sure how much I actually liked it. For one thing, I thought the writing and characters were rather snobbish and classist. Which, granted, isn’t unusual for Regency romances, but this seemed to be even moreso than the norm. But I was more put off by how Sophy tended to be prejudiced, and typically proven right in her prejudice. Not to mention the fact that she was almost never wrong, despite being very interfering, and that when she was, it tended to end up making things better. Like, I kept waiting for her to really be wrong about something, or to make a mistake that had consequences, so there’d be character growth, but it never really happens. Which is kind of sad for me, because if there had been growth and change, I think I would have ended up in love with her, as opposed to being entertained by her, but not incredibly fond of her. As it is, I’m a bit concerned about Charles’s sanity a few years down the road.

I think, though, that a large part of it is that I’m not a big fan of matchmaker plots. While I tend to be fine with romantic plotlines where a side character is playing matchmaker, I’m not sure there’s anything where a main character is always matchmaking that I really like aside from Jane Austen’s Emma (which I have yet to read the book of, but I have seen adaptations) and part of why I like it is that she does mess up terribly, and learns from her mistakes.

Comments

[troisroyaumes]

Hm, that's a good point about Sophy; I couldn't quite pin my finger on why I didn't really like her when I read the book. I remember being bothered by the anti-Semitism as well. I do remember that it was one of the Heyer novels with a less insufferable hero though.

[meganbmoore]

I don't DISlike her, I just don't like how she seems to be so, for lack of a better word, idealized by the text to where I wonder if there would be a perfectly justifiable reason for her to kick a puppy.