The Nonesuch

The Nonesuch is a Regency romance by the English writer Georgette Heyer, published by Heinemann in Britain in 1962 and by E. P. Dutton in the United States the following year. Its events take place in 1816 and 1817.

Sir Waldo Hawkridge has inherited Broom Hall in Yorkshire from Joseph Calver, a miserly cousin he never met, and he goes north to inspect his unexpected property. He is thirty-five, wealthy and unmarried, and a reputation for athletic achievement has given him a nickname he cannot shake off, which makes him conspicuous in a country neighbourhood where everyone knows everyone else's business. The novel follows him through the local families, their courtships and their snobberies, and the young woman whose plain opinion of him is not the flattery he is used to.

Heyer wrote Regency novels for more than forty years and worked from the period's newspapers, letters and memoirs rather than from later costume drama, so the speech, money and manners in her books are built from contemporary material. This was one of her late novels.