RogerBW's Blog

The Foundling, Georgette Heyer 09 October 2025

1948 Regency romance. Gilly, or Adolphus Gillespie Vernon Ware the Duke of Sale, was a sickly child, and has been brought up in luxury but thoroughly insulated from the world. About to come of age, and feeling his arranged marriage locking him further into other people's expectations, he determines to live just for a little while as an ordinary person.

His cousin's embroilment in a possible breach of promise case provides the final motivating factor, and he sets off as "Mr Rufford" (one of his secondary titles) to recover the incriminating letters, ideally without paying through the nose. In the course of this he acquires two protégés: Tom Mamble, an ironmaster's son who's given his tutor the slip and is determined to get into all the trouble that it's possible for a young lad to involve himself in, and Belinda, the titular Foundling, a young woman of transcendent beauty but very little brain. Clearly they can't be turned away to get into trouble on their own, even if "Mr Rufford's" reputation will suffer.

But this all takes longer than expected: meanwhile, Gilly's vanished from London, and his other cousin and heir-presumptive Gideon is too amused by the idea that he might have murdered Gilly to make more than a perfunctory denial. Various people set off to look for Gilly, while he makes haste to Bath to lodge Belinda with his fiancée at least until some safe haven can be found for her.

As I reread Heyer in order of publication, I'm struck by the contrast with her previous book The Reluctant Widow. Both books are about adventure more than romance, but where Widow made the romance an almost perfunctory addition to the final scenes, Foundling manages to bring Harriet, Gilly's intended, back in at about the three-quarters mark, and if she's not as involved in the adventure as Gilly, the extent to which she is involved develops the love story too. Each of them has been warned by well-meaning elders that they must not look for romance or passion in marriage (and it's tacitly assumed they will find it elsewhere), and to all appearances Gilly is brazenly lodging his mistress with his fiancée; but the outrageousness of the situation demands that they talk with each other beyond the polite forms, and in talking they discover something of their true feelings.

I haven't even mentioned the secondary characters, including a fine plausible and shameless rogue. But while the narrative sticks to the thread that Gilly's adventures, and need to fend for himself, have been the making of him, I think there's a significant secondary strand in that he doesn't simply ruin Belinda and then cast her aside once he's bored with her, as everyone clearly expects him to if they don't assume he's in the process of doing it already. He's not constrained here by the expectations of society or upbringing; he falls back on his own moral code.

Which is more than one might reasonably expect from a fluffy romantic adventure.

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See also:
The Reluctant Widow, Georgette Heyer

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