Romance, Romantics, and Research

I have no good opinion of romance novels. As a genre, they sacrifice everything, including prose, grammar, sensibility, realism, imagination, and punctuation for an outdated convention and illicit scenes. Long ago, though, authors still held themselves to some standards and wrote from an education. I discovered Georgette Heyer during an anti-romance rant and enjoyed it thoroughly. She did her homework. I'm currently reading another of her novels, and I discovered that her heroine is the child of a companion of Robert Southey and Coleridge, and party to their early scheme to settle on the Susquehanna under communistic principles. Southey became the laureate (sold out, according to Coleridge) just previous to the time setting of this book. The heroine's maternal grandmother was the first Mrs. Godwin, running in the feminist circles that produced Mary Shelley.

I enjoyed very much running across these references, and knowing that Ms. Heyer did her homework as she was writing The Quiet Gentleman in probably 1950. I have also read An Infamous Army which contains (without slipping into the superlative of some hubristic fandom) an incredibly detailed and researched account of the battle of Waterloo (which I must admit, I found almost as difficult to slog through as Victor Hugo's or Tolkien's battle scenes in The Two Towers). The resulting novel, as I recall, was very well balanced and at least marginally realistic.

Way to go, Georgette! I also recommend her successor, A.S. Byatt, who would more than likely take offense at that description, as her writing developed in a different direction (scholar first, novelist second).

A Brief Academic Blush

While discussing Dickens's Bleak House with a fellow reference librarian I was introduced to a new Victorian writer. Egotistically, I had presumed to know (or at least have heard of) all of the major 19th Century writers. As a devotee of British Mysteries, I am appalled at my own ignorance. Wilkie Collins seems to have launched the genre with two major novels: The Woman in White and The Moonstone, although he wrote much more than that.
I'm going to read them, but in the meantime some good background sites I found:
http://www.wilkiecollins.com/
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/collins/index.html (Victorianweb is a generally reliable and very thorough site for all artistic endeavors Victorian)
http://www.litgothic.com/Authors/wilkie.html to fit him into the fracturing face of literature in that era