Heyer’s hero is the much-beloved, Lord Damerel, a rake with a past who enters into the romantic rural idyll of Undershaw and wins Venetia’s love, only to retreat when he decides he cannot give her the life he believes she deserves. As Lancaster points out, Venetia belongs to the sub-genre of pastoral romance, with its beautiful heroine, whose life, lived for so long in her pleasant rural fastness, is interrupted by the arrival of the hero from the outside world. It is also a novel about selfishness, a book about honesty and, as Anne Lancashire, explains in her excellent article, “Venetia: Georgette Heyer’s Pastoral Romance”, it is a story that draws on the long tradition of the pastoral – the centuries-old literary genre that “celebrates, with stylistic artifice, rural life as an idyllic escape from the burdens and anxieties of everyday existence in a non-rural environment”. Venetia is a sparkling tale of newfound love, idyllic romance, and friendship. It is a remarkable reflection of her enduring talent that more than forty years after writing her first novel, her forty-sixth book should be so fresh and new. Venetia would be Georgette Heyer’s 17th Regency novel and also one of her finest books.

The 1958 Heinemann first edition of Venetia with jacket design by Arthur Barbosa.

Venetia heyer