Georgette Heyer, Jane Austen: Plot & Story

*Repost*

I'm a fan of Heyer and Austen. They are alike in some ways but differ substantially in others. 

Comparison One
Listening to Pride & Prejudice [in 2005], I was struck by the hardheadedness underlying all that sensibility. Elizabeth gets angry over Darcy's interference with Bingley & Jane, but her anger is undercut by the fact that everybody is interfering with everybody all the time. Her aunt gives her advice. Elizabeth gives her sister and Charlotte advice. Charlotte gives Elizabeth advice. It's just an orgy of opinions. What is comes down to is: everybody wants love but nobody wants to be poor.

Georgette Heyer, who did a large amount of research on the dress and setting of the period, exhibits equal realism: she never marries her lords to peasant girls. 

However, although everyone is on the make, somehow that fact never entirely rises to the surface. Heyer keeps it carefully under control. Lovely young ladies turn out to be heiresses. Handsome young men turn out to her heirs. Supposed changelings turn out to have Viscounts for fathers. The right-sorts-of-people remain the right-sorts-of-people. 

Austen is far more aware of individual choice plus random chance: how easily people can cross the line into struggling to survive.  

Comparison Two
Austen is about story while Heyer is about plot. These terms are often interchangeable, so I define what I mean by them below. 

Plot is things happening: this happens, then this, then this, now this. Story is best described using a Stephen King image. He describes the process of writing as uncovering a skeleton. The story is already there, whole, intact. It just needs to be brought to the surface. 

With plot, the end is always a twist, a change of fortune, the turn of the wheel. In Heyer's These Old Shades, the non-changeling changeling gets captured by her despicable father, rescued by her saturnine lover, presented to all of Paris, confronted with the supposed fact of her illegitimacy at which she runs away to save her lover from her supposed bad reputation. She is finally recovered by her lover and restored to all her rights and privileges (I'm using lover in the old sense of the word; this is Georgette Heyer: nobody sleeps with anybody until they are married, although the dandies and members of the ton have mistresses that occurred offstage and long before the plot began).

The above book is a ton of fun! But it isn't the same as story. With story, the ending is incipient in the beginning. No twist is necessary to bring about a particular ending. The ending already exists, inviolate, known (although not necessarily revealed yet to the reader). The parts of the story hold together like a statue, a shape. As one reads, one gets a sense of an emerging totality. 

Take Elizabeth and Darcy. Both Elizabeth and Darcy undergo an enlightenment, a point when they reorganize their thoughts and feelings. Elizabeth is angered, then humiliated and aggrieved by Darcy's letter. Darcy is angered, then embarrassed by Elizabeth's accusations of "ungentlemanly" behavior. But the argument has been coming for a long-time. The mutual feelings of attraction (I side with those who think that Elizabeth was always attracted, or, at least, interested in Darcy) and irritation have been growing for awhile. Elizabeth's visit to Pemberley isn't contrived. Elizabeth's arrival there is, on a metaphorical level, simply one more piece of the relationship pie. Darcy's intercession with Wickham & Lydia isn't a lucky chance. It is forecast by Darcy's behavior at Netherfield Park where he purchases reputation at the expense of Lydia's future (who might not matter but Elizabeth and Jane certainly do), behavior he must rectify. 

This quality of inevitability is true of all Austen's books, including, especially, Mansfield Park. Much praise has been heaped up concerning Mary Crawford's wit with the follow-up implication that Austen admire Mary Crawford and that Austen only removed Ms. Crawford from the book as a kind of plot contrivance. But Edmund's disillusionment is a long-time coming. The wit of Elizabeth is not reworked in Mary Crawford or, if it is, Austen was older and wiser and knew that wit can be a mean-spirited tool when used by superficial and self-absorbed individuals. (And Elizabeth is not mean-spirited--unlike Mary Crawford). 

Edmund's disillusionment is there from the beginning. No twist needs to bring it about. Austen's interference is only to remove his blinders before he proposes. (And since the said removal comes through Henry Crawford's behavior, it too was foreseeable.)

Conclusion
I'll go so far as to say that all great works have story, rather than just plot. However, plot isn't a bad thing. Better to have something happen, after all, than just profound navel-gazing. Still, in the end, story reigns supreme.