Faro's Daughter by Georgette Heyer
by
Natasa Djordjevic
- 3:00 PM
“Miss Grantham's sense of humour got the better of her at this point, and, tottering towards a chair, she sank into it, exclaiming in tragic accents:'Oh Heavens! I am betrayed!' His lordship blenched; both he and Miss Laxton regarded her with guilty dismay. Miss Grantham buried her face in her handkerchief, and uttered one shattering word: 'Wretch!”
Set in the late 1700s, Heyer’s novel about the beautiful Deborah Grantham and her verbal sparring with the wealthy Max Ravenscar is a real delight to read. Deborah helps run her aunt’s gaming house in London and the young nephew of Max falls in love with her. Max hopes to extricate him from “the toils of a harpy” but his grudging admiration of her and Deborah’s growing feelings for the seemingly hard-hearted Max drives this story. A kidnapping, a runaway, an elopement, and a curricle race with a fortune at stake are all part of the tale of the intelligent Deborah, who is described as tall and “queenly”, and Max who is rich and handsome but hard-hearted. How their prejudice changes to love is a delight to read. One of the charms of reading Georgette Heyer’s books is the fact that her heroes and heroines are all different. There is not always a handsome and pleasant hero, and the heroines come from all walks of life, some of them shy and retiring, others intelligent, or naïve and even silly. But even with the inevitability of the “hero getting the heroine”, Heyer makes us love them in all their infinite variety. A case in point is “Faro’s Daughter”: we can imagine Max and Deborah’s lives together: probably not easy, a lot of arguments, but a grand and fiery passion that would be a love story to the very end.
