Ah, the happy escapism of Georgette Heyer...

I've been reading Bath Tangle instead of studying, and I'm enjoying it hugely.

So far, Fanny is in love with Major Kirkby, who is engaged to her step-daughter Serena. Serena, although fancying herself in love with Major Kirkby, is actually in love with the Marquis of Rotherham, to whom she was engaged five years earlier, but cried off. The Marquis is engaged to Emily Laleham, a lass of seventeen, who was pressured into the match by her horrible mother. Nobody yet knows why the Marquis wants to marry her, because she's far too young for him. I had thought that Emily would eventually run off with Mr Goring, a good friend of her grandmother's, Mrs Floore, but a young Mr Monksleigh, the ward of the Marquis, has just turned up in Bath and professed undying love for her. He's a silly young nitwit, however, so the dependable Mr Goring might get a look in after all.

I'm sure it will all turn out fine.

What the...?

Well and so. I'm sitting at home writing a comparative essay on a bunch of English Renaissance texts, and alternately reading a Georgette Heyer novel to take my mind off things.

The essay is ... getting there. Right now I'm about to start a paragraph on feminine chastity and how it's a real fascination of these texts, and need to find some way to make it link in with the ideal of nobility, which is what the essay is officially about.

On the other hand, the novel is getting weird. (Georgette Heyer, Lady of Quality, (London: Arrow Books, 2005).) The female lead has fallen in love with the male lead, the male lead has fallen in love with the female lead, and he's just proposed to her! There's nearly 70 pages left to go! What is she thinking! I should add that in Heyer's world it isn't at all unusual for the proposal, or even marriage, to happen very early in the piece, but the complication there is the marriage of convenience, and the need for both partners to realise that they're actually in love with their spouses. Here, there is no such complication.

I'm so confused...

EDIT: A bunch of people got the flu. I say again: What the...?
EDIT2: Essay going well. Just managed to squeeze in a gratuitous reference to Volpone which we haven't even been studying, because the Celia subplot fit in well with the whole chastity thing. 1200 words down, another 1800 to go. Well, that's the upper limit, anyway. I need to come up with at least another 1300 to be legal. I've never had to write an essay of this length before. It's interesting having all that extra room to move around in.

Randomness

Right now I'm staying in a hotel that's exactly my size. The bed is just the right length for me, the shower head barely clears my head, there is precisely one piece of paper in the handy folder, which is good, because I had to leave a note about the power to the kitchen area having shorted out. (I haven't had a cup of tea this morning. I won't get one until midday because the water is off in the building I'm working in. The pain!) So it all kind of works, but I wouldn't want to be John's or Morgan's height and staying there. The problem is that I can't remember the name of the ogre who had an Inn and stretched or shrank people to fit it, or this post would have had a much more interesting title.

On Monday, I went to see a chick flick called Just My Luck. It's a workable example of its genre, although no real surprises. I think that Serendipity, with a similar premise, did a far classier job of setting up elaborate coincidences and making them work. Still, it reminds me that the genre of Romantic Comedy, one of the most contrived around, gets most of its entertainment value from the secondary characters - the two leads have too many restrictions on what their characters can be like.

Georgette Heyer is back in print. :-D She, too, writes highly contrived romances, and they're a lot of fun. She's noticable for using a lot of Regency slang which I can only assume is correct, because most of the phrases she uses I've only read in her books, but I will add for your consideration, gentle readers, the phrase "I must have returned" which is a genuine period phrasing because the more sophisticated verb phrase "I would have had to return" or even "I should have had to return" had not yet been invented. I also note that she makes the distinction between the "will" of volition and the "shall" of obligation. ENGL224 is a course that rocks!

The computer program I'm working on is giving me some results that I don't understand. This is very frustrating.

Take care, all.

EDIT: And in other, happy, news, NeonGraal has trumped the rash of Aucklanders recently announcing that they're pregnant by announcing his engagement. Many congratulations and felicitations.

AND ANOTHER EDIT BECAUSE I FORGOT TO SAY BEFORE:
One of the pleasures of staying in a hotel is being able to bum around in your underwear entirely free of worry about wandering flatmates, neighbours or random visiting vicars seeing that which they ought not while you're making yourself a nice hot cup of tea. This is only a good idea, however, if the fire alarm doesn't go off.