A Gentleman's Offer by Emma Orchard

Emma Orchard's debt to Georgette Heyer is evident throughout A Gentleman's Offer. Orchard, a former copy editor at Mills & Boon, makes this overt — she writes in her acknowledgements how she began with Heyer fanfiction during the Covid lockdowns and then moved onto her own original characters. As I've been exploring Georgette Heyer's work myself, I've become interested in her influence on contemporary historical fiction and was curious to see how it would manifest here.

I recognised a lot of her favourite tropes in A Gentleman's Offer. The hero, Dominic or "Beau" de Lacy, is languid, sardonic, and very concerned with his personal appearance, rather like Jack in The Black Moth and Alverstoke in Frederica. The heroine, Meg Nightingale, is an outspoken young woman with a very dysfunctional family, who is thrown into a high-stakes scheme to preserve her sister's reputation. There's also plenty of Heyer-esque slang (people are "in alt" and use epithets like "frippery fellow").

The actual plot of the book, in which Meg has to impersonate her twin sister Maria after the latter suddenly disappears three weeks before her big society wedding to Dominic, was of less interest to me than the world of London high society in 1817 and the characters who inhabit it. The action turns a bit farcical in the second half, although not to a degree that overly bothered me.

The big difference to a genuine Heyer novel is the time Orchard spends on physical desire; there are the sort of explicit scenes that Georgette could never have published. They help this book feel more like its own work and less of a pastiche, as does the introduction of themes around sexuality and race, which are handled in a manner that feels appropriate to the 1817 setting.

This was a quick and entertaining read, which pays due homage to the originator of the form.

If you purchase this book from one of the following places, I receive a small commission that supports my writing. The price remains the same for you.

Bookshop.org (UK) | Bookshop.org (US) | Waterstones | Amazon | Audible | Kobo