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Venetia is many readers� favorite Heyer novel, but not mine. The heroine is older, bolder, and little concerned with the proprieties; she is also kind and thoughtful and beautiful, so you get to have it both ways. The hero is the epitome of Heyer’s rakish strain of male leads, and he comes to Venetia’s neighborhood trailing epigrams and the sulfurous odor of wickedness. They meet and sparks instantaneously fly, but his reputation and secrets from her past generate lots of opposition. The hero, trying to reform and be belatedly (and, it must be said, inconsistently) noble, tries to renounce the heroine, but the heart knows what it knows and a happy ending is guaranteed.

It’s a challenge for a feminist to manage the cognitive dissonance of enjoying romantic fiction, and I believe the root of my dislike for this book lies in the fact that here, the dissonance is not a whisper but a roar. This freethinking heroine is a freethinker only in a 1950s kind of way (the decade when the book was written; it’s set around 1818) that I find particularly toxic. Example: early in the story, when contemplating the life of a rake, our heroine’s thoughts run thus: “With his loves she was as little concerned as with his first encounter with herself [when he seized her, a total stranger, and forcibly kissed her]. That had angered her, but it had neither shocked nor disgusted her. Men—witness all the histories!—were subject to sudden lusts and violences, affairs that seemed strangely divorced from heart or head, and often more strangely still from what were surely their true characters. For them chastity was not a prime virtue: she remembered her amazement when she had discovered that so correct a gentleman and kind a husband as Sir John Denny had not always been faithful to his lady. Had Lady Denny cared? A little, perhaps, but she had not allowed it to blight her marriage.� She eagerly sops up advice like “Never seek to pry into what does not concern you, but rather look in the opposite direction!� (I suppose the wife can just look the other way when she develops syphilis?) In my worldview this is cheating, a profound betrayal, and the wife who accepts it is an enabler. There is no earthly reason for the perpetuation of such a blatant double standard. Men can be as violent and dishonest as they please, because it’s simply their nature? So much for any romantic feelz I might have been building up; I have no desire to imagine myself in her shoes.

That central premise of this book is what most irritates me, but there are other more minor annoyances. It is more explicitly sensual and romantic than most of Heyer’s novels, and I am more attracted to restraint than to overt accounts of emotion and desire. Venetia is a physical being, and her love for the hero is in the reader’s face on every page—for me, that ruins the suspense and leaves me no gaps to fill in with my own imagination. To underscore the couple’s intense attachment, Heyer puts endless epithets in their mouths like “my dear friend� and “my lovely one� and has the heroine lift her face for a kiss (from a man who has not declared his intentions) multiple times. According to the manners of the age, this behavior would make her a strumpet, and I’m embarrassed to be around two people with so little conduct. These are, I suspect, the very qualities of the book that appeal to many readers, so let us simply say it’s not to my taste.

I also find it uneven in a way that Heyer rarely is. Characters occasionally do things that are out of character. The antagonists are caricatures of their types, overdrawn and one-note. And the resolution comes suddenly, in the middle of a scene, when the hero reverses a strongly held position without meaningful explanation. I’ve now given this book every chance I could, read it three times, and life’s too short for any further atttempts.