Powder and Patch

Powder and Patch is a novel by Georgette Heyer, first published by Mills and Boon in 1923 under the title The Transformation of Philip Jettan and the pen name Stella Martin.

Philip Jettan lives in the English countryside in the eighteenth century, where he is irreproachably decent and almost entirely without the social accomplishments that his neighbour Cleone Charteris has learned to value. Cleone returns from finishing school with her charms fully developed and her expectations raised, and she makes it plain that a husband should be refined, aristocratic, and as skilled with a remark as with a duelling pistol, none of which describes Philip. At his father's urging he goes to Paris to acquire the manners she says she wants, and the novel follows what happens when he returns as a different man and finds that the woman he set out to please may not have known what she was asking for.

The book was reissued by William Heinemann in 1930 as Powder and Patch with its original final chapter removed, and it is one of Heyer's earliest novels, written long before the Regency romances that made her name.