Word: heyer
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...uninitiated usually find conversations between Heyer addicts incomprehensible, since one of the marks of Heyer cultism is an intimate knowledge of the rituals of the peerage. Heyer's work is peppered with references to laudelets, phaetons, barques of frailty, diamonds of the first water, and vouchers to Almack's. A careful reader is also likely to be familiar with the origin of Lady Sally Jersey's nickname, the Prince Regent's confused marital status, and Lord Petersham's penchant for mixing snuff. Heyer's research into the lifestyle of the peerage may not have produced great sociological tracts...
Still, the desire for proficiency in Regency slang can only carry one so far. It does not explain why I have read every one of Heyer's romances at least once, and most of them several times more. An explanation might lie in the apolitical, reality-free spell her books cast. By the time you have turned the first few pages of a typical Heyer, you are barely sensible of the existence of the lower classes, except in terms of the hero's feudal obligations to his old retainers. Even the most determined revolutionary has to abandon class analysis...
...Heyer's twenty-odd books there is basically only one plot. The hero and the heroine, thrown together by chance at the outset, almost invaribly take an instant dislike to one another. Heyer's protagonists are all well-born and haughty, and nearly all are extremely strong-willed. Presented as fairly intelligent and mature, they would never do anything so bland and conventional as to fall in love at first sight--it usually takes 150 pages...
...absurd clothes, worrying only about the make of their Hessians and the height of their collars. Brainless beauties fall desperately in love with ineligible fortune hunters and threaten to elope across the border to Scotland in the face of their family's disapproval. These other, less competent characters make Heyer's novels witty, as well as sentimental--they are constantly embroiling themselves in absurd engagements to avoid the disgrace of having been found alone with a member of the other sex, discovering they can't cover their gambling debts until the end of the quarter, or running away from...
...reader, sighing romantically, is left with enchanting scenes like this one from the end of The Grand Sophy, one of Heyer's best...