NEA: AQA (A); Edexcel; WJEC eduqas
Georgette Heyer’s novels would not exist without Jane Austen’s. Elizabeth Bennet’s battle of the sexes with Fitzwilliam Darcy in Pride and Prejudice (1813) underpins the romance between the spirited Sophia Stanton-Lacy and her disapproving cousin Charles Rivenhall in The Grand Sophy (1950), as Heyer reworks this classic trope of the literature of love. As ‘handsome, clever and rich’ as Emma Woodhouse, Sophy is more cosmopolitan and sophisticated, and a much better matchmaker. Having raised his only child abroad in a highly unorthodox manner, the suave widowed diplomat Sir Horace Stanton-Lacy sends his ‘little Sophy’ to stay with his sister’s large family to enjoy the London season. The novel’s action unfolds across a series of comic set-pieces, as Sophy briskly fixes all her unhappy relatives’ economic and romantic problems before freeing Charles from his disastrous engagement so he can marry her instead.
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