Cotillion

Cotillion is a Regency novel by Georgette Heyer, published in January 1953 in the United Kingdom and a month later in the United States.

Matthew Penicuik has brought up Catherine Charing, the orphaned daughter of an old friend, in the isolation of his country house, and his will attaches a condition to her inheritance: the money becomes her dowry only if she marries one of his three great-nephews. Kitty finds that intolerable, as does almost everybody else involved, since the three candidates are competing for her hand for reasons that have very little to do with her. She has already given her heart to Jack Westruther, a handsome and thoroughly confirmed rake who is perfectly aware of her feelings and has taken no steps to act on them. The novel arranges the whole business as a comedy of relations, fortune-hunters and misunderstood intentions.

Heyer writes Regency society with close attention to its rules and a strong taste for farce, and this book is one of the most cheerful of a long series of novels set in the same period.