Lady of Quality

Lady of Quality is the last Regency novel Georgette Heyer published, brought out in Britain by The Bodley Head and in the United States by E. P. Dutton in 1972. It was the final book of hers to appear in her lifetime, and it returns to the Bath setting and the manners of the English Regency that she had been writing about since the thirties.

Annis Wychwood is independent, well off and uninterested in the marriage market, and she has already survived the disappointment of one long engagement. When she sponsors the coming out of Lucilla Carleton she takes on an obligation that brings her into constant contact with Lucilla's uncle and guardian, Oliver Carleton, whose willingness to say exactly what he thinks has made him socially impossible.

The novel is a courtship in which both parties have avoided marriage for years and are slow to admit what is happening, and its comedy comes from the small restrictions of polite society rather than from a plot of concealment. Heyer puts the story in Bath in about 1818 and works through calls, drives and assemblies rather than scenes of danger.