cimorene

In A Civil Contract, a dutiful young officer quits the Napoleonic wars on the death of his father and comes home to find his parent's reckless gambling, speculating, and spending has left the estate so indebted and mortgaged that the only way out is to sell the ancestral home (which, however, has only been theirs since the 1500s - before that it was an abbey, and it's probably hideous from the descriptions, though of course most of the characters like it). That's the only way HE sees, but not the only way other people see! His dad's best chum and his man of business both want to marry him off to the highest bidder, and in the end they get their way. He marries Heyer's trademarked Quiet, Practical, No-Nonsense Girl Who Might Be Plump And/Or Called a Squab and Definitely Has Grey Eyes. (In this iteration her name is Jenny, and she's been in love with him for a couple of years, only he doesn't ever find that out and, in fact, doesn't even recognize her when they meet again, despite having been constantly in her company in the past.)

It's obvious that Heyer is trying to do several things here - turning on their heads tropes which she excelled at in her younger years:

The marriage of convenience: usually it turns out that he loved her all along and just didn't know it or didn't admit it, or he falls in love with her quite early. Heyer is patently trying to take a more realistic approach, contrasting youthful infatuation with the companionate love that grows in marriage; rather than even thinking that he has come to love his wife, her Hero thinks that being comfortable is more important than being in love and love kind of sucked anyway, and the book closes on the heroine thinking the same thing with, I fancy, a ring of bitterness.

Resuscitating the family fortune by selling off the daughter: Heyer has done this lots of times, and she didn't invent it, either, because it was a common enough practice (though of course, in reality it actually went both ways - and impoverished aristocrats marrying heiresses was actually perhaps more common than pretty impoverished maidens marrying wealthy aristocrats. However, it's undeniable that in the genre tropes, the Cinderella version is far more common, and Heyer makes it explicit that comparison is intended near the beginning of the novel by contrasting the brother's treatment of himself with his unwillingness to even attempt to "sell off" either of his sisters: one suggests it herself, and is laughed down, and the other was pressured towards a wealthy match by their tiresome mother, but the brother is wholly behind her decision to marry the country squire, and makes certain that she does so. In fact, the brother's refusal to sell off his sisters - his well-bred shock at the idea - is probably intended for a kind of feminism, which is a thread generally underlying Heyer's romances. His matter-of-fact willingness to "sacrifice" himself instead by giving up his beautiful childhood sweetheart, a Nonpareil, to marry the plump no-nonsense Cit's daughter, is even gallant, in a way.

Pursuant to the selling-off-dependent-females vs selling-oneself theme, a great deal of the book is concerned with economics, particularly the hero's prideful scruples about accepting his father-in-law's money. This is arguably the true romance of the book: Hero/His Married Money, because this is the relationship that undergoes a steady development and finally reaches a turning point, with him perfectly willing to accept what's his father-in-law's (or wife's) as his and throw in his lot with them... but only after he breaks the golden chains, rejects Daddy's financial advice, and makes his fortune on the 'Change buying war bonds. ...So in other words, this aspect of the story is in fact the most problematic. Aside from the main narrative being essentially Dude/Father-in-law by proxy (well supported by the plot: Daddy is the 3rd main character and has just as much screentime and relationship interaction as his daughter), the Hero's virtuous enlightenment when he apparently gets over his pride doesn't really mean what she intended it to mean. He doesn't give an inch until after he feels that he's earned money on his own merits, restoring his Breadwinner Manhood which has been threatened throughout the book. In fact, he doesn't really seem to learn much of anything: it's obviously easy to be casual about money once you have it: it's only the consciousness that he could pay Daddy back that makes him happy not to do so.

Similarly, I see this book as trying to contrast companionate love favourably with infatuation, but unconsciously (and rather ironically) failing. The companionate love which Heyer describes as "comfortable" never warrants the word "love" applied to it at all, and primarily consists of the hero admiring his wife's talent as a housewife. We're told but not shown that she's proficient in multiple languages, and we learn that she's well-read only because she prefers reading about farming (his hobby) to reading anything that she might have personally enjoyed for its own value, like her many novels. We're told that she's a treasure-trove of trivia, and knows everything about collecting china (among other things), but are given only one paragraph of indirect dialogue for her to demonstrate her knowledge, which is deprecated as being inferior to her father's uneducated passion for collecting by both her AND the hero, who wishes wistfully that he could get her father to talk about the collecting instead of deferring to her "book learning". Where the heroine should have been shown to have character and agency in her own right, Heyer endows her with virtues that on paper are very interesting, but then never shows us anything but a wholly reactive milksop; Heyer herself is clearly bored. And while the hero's First Love gets the full force of Heyer's scorn for histrionic females, going off in raptures about ghosts and ruins and poetry, and is eventually villified far beyond what she deserves, she is actually far more interesting a character to read about. The sole way in which the heroine is shown to be better-suited for the hero is in their shared practicality and desire to eyeroll in response to raptures about ghosts - well, that, and liking to live in the countryside.

The treatment of Daddy is also a prime example of Heyer's peculiar version of the hugely problematic English class issues, but not an unusual one. I think I'll save that rant for another day.