Read part 1 Read part 2 The “bodice-ripper” is a parody of the old historical, substituting explicit sex for scenes of derring-do. (In those I examined, chosen at random from the shelves, each had at least two sex scenes in …

Read Part 1 here With the heaviness taken out of the historical novel, the remainder was lightweight. Lightweight reading can not, of course, be taken serious, either by the critics or the intellectuals. From here it is easy to anticipate …

Buried inconspicuously on the obituary page of the New York Times of July 6th, 1974 was a brief paragraph reporting the death of Georgette Heyer. The obit editor was probably unaware that for hundreds of thousands of readers, Miss Heyer’s passing was a blow worthy of front-page headlines. Why was the obit editor unaware of this? Because Georgette Heyer wrote romances, and even though any bookseller will tell you that her books are still best-sellers (all fifty of them), nobody admits to reading them.