I think they misunderstand ‘romance’. Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer wrote novels which happened to have major romantic plot lines. They also had passages which dealt with the slave trade and its morality (Mansfield Park, Austen), the Napoleonic Wars (Heyer, An Infamous Army), with poverty and its effects on women (Sense and Sensibility, Austen), with hypocrisy (Sylvester, Heyer), with the general differences in moral views in rural England (Austen) and in London and other metropolises (Heyer), with characters who were shallow and deep, comic and tragic, families with flaws who yet managed to help each other through (Pride and Prejudice, Austen), (The Masqueraders, Heyer), families who ‘broke’ under the strain of temptations (Mansfield Park, Austen, Persuasion, Austen), (The Black Moth, Heyer); and above all, these were not novels written solely about "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl’ with a couple of artificially contrived and usually sloppily written scenes of ‘nearly succumbing to sex’, but rather slices of extremely well written, literate, witty, enchanting dialog between as fine a cross section of people as one could ever hope to meet.
And in the end, the deserving boys and girls/men and women/husbands and wives/parents and children move on to spread their love ‘outward’. . .even to the LESS deserving, to whom they will still offer help, and who even at the worst (Wickham, S&S, Austen), (Belmanoir, The Black Moth, Heyer) still show some gleams of remorse and self-knowledge which have the power of redemption in the future.
It’s the best of morality in these authors especially which makes their works so enjoyable.
If you haven’t been able to guess, I possess all the works of both the above authors and have been reading both for nearly 50 years now (yes I was a very precocious young reader, for which I’m thankful to God!)
