When a small group of colleagues at Anglia Ruskin originally planned a little colloquium on an author we all love, Georgette Heyer, none of us anticipated how popular the idea would prove. Nor had we realized that this was the first ever conference devoted to Heyer’s works. So it was very cheering to see places get snapped up so quickly – though sad to have to turn away later enquirers.

We were all delighted that Jennifer Kloester was able to give us a sneak preview of material from her new biography of Heyer. (There was a little ‘oooh’ from the audience when she revealed that she had identified seven ‘new’ Heyer stories.) It was fascinating to see newly discovered photographs of Heyer – and learn more about episodes from her early publishing career such as her suppression of The Great Roxhythe.

Jay Dixon then gave a very suggestive paper on ‘Heyer and Place’, examining Heyer’s use of brief but deft and evocative descriptions of location to set the scene for her tales – as well as her dependence on the resonances of certain place names for readers familiar with her very individual version of the ‘Regency World’.

Laura Vivanco, who contributes to the Teach Me Tonight blog, spoke on The Nonesuch as Didactic Love Fiction. Her exposition of some of the moral lessons contained in that novel, in particular the way in which the moral shortcomings of Tiffany, the spoilt young beauty, are revealed to her admirer, put me in mind of Fanny Burney’s Camilla which deals with a rather similar group of young people, including the lovely but superficial Indiana. But I also found myself thinking of another of my favourite novelists, Charlotte M. Yonge, a fact which made me reflect that there is something oddly Victorian somehow about The Nonesuch.

Some of these thoughts stayed with me during Mary Joannou’s paper, ‘Heyer and Austen’ as she too was reflecting on the relationship between Heyer and historical period, drawing particular attention to the way in which Heyer conjures up a stylised rather than an authentic version of the Regency, inserting her rather un-Austen like characters into Austen’s own world, offering us heroines who go around London armed with such unladylike accessories as a pistol and a social conscience, designed to please twentieth-century tastes rather than recapture Regency structures of feeling.

The way in which later ages try (or don’t try) to capture the spirit of the past was also central to Sam Rayner’s entertaining discussion of the way in which Heyer’s book covers have changed over the decades. It was amusing to see the disparity between Barbosa’s elegant and restrained designs and the rather lurid ‘bodice ripper’ covers which became popular when the novels were first published in paperback.

After lunch we enjoyed an intriguingly titled paper by Kerstin Frank, ‘The Thermodynamics of Georgette Heyer’, which explored the way in which the warm and spontaneous young heroines disrupt the lives of the more cool and languid heroes. The pattern is susceptible to variation of course and in Cotillion Freddie has to learn how to be – or at least pretend to be – more cool than is his wont in order to become a true, if not a typical, Heyer hero.

Yesterday evening my husband (who has yet to read any Heyer) asked whether my own paper was the ‘edgiest’ of the day. I’d say Catherine Johns probably had that distinction. No one gets agitated on being told a novel has a queer subtext these days whereas, as Catherine pointed out, her own topic, ‘Class and Breeding’, can make people nervous. She placed Heyer’s class consciousness within the context of her upbringing in the first decades of the twentieth century, a time when barriers between the classes were both more rigid and more visible than they are today. This was an extremely elegant paper, although I still think it’s a pity that Heyer’s novels are, to my mind, more class bound than say Persuasion.

My own paper, ‘Lady of Quality and Homosexual Panic’ used Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s notion of ‘homosexual panic’ to try to decode a pattern of lesbian anxiety at work in Heyer’s final Regency, anxiety which is centred on Annis Wychwood’s relationship both with her older companion, Miss Farlow, and with her young protégée, Lucilla.

The final speaker was Elizabeth Spillman who analysed Heyer’s treatment of cross dressing, investigating whether the disguises of three heroines (and one hero) function not simply as a means of hiding their identity and escaping danger or discovery, but as mechanisms which allow them to articulate aspects of their personality, to ‘be themselves’. I certainly always feel some regret when Leonie, Pen, Robin and Prudence return to their ‘real’ gender roles.

The conference concluded with a lively final discussion in which many participated. I hope everyone enjoyed the day as much as I did. Certainly I can’t remember encountering such an enthusiastic audience at a conference before - I’ve attended quite a lot of academic conferences – but never one where there was anything like so much cheering and laughter!

Results from our little questionnaire into delegates’ reading habits will be revealed as soon as I have processed the data!