Customer Reviews
My favourite book by Georgette Heyer - By: Aikabella, 10 Feb 2008 
I love this book & I always cry when I read it, you reallly feel for Phoebe in the scrapes that she gets into, despite being so well meaning!
wonderful - By: lady, 23 Jan 2008 This is truely wonderful. Not any other word is suitable to describe it. I could not put it down till I finished it. The plot, the characters, the conversations, the descriptions are so real, as it is in any other heyer book. Highly recommended.
Sylvester - By: Elizabeth Trigg, 07 Mar 2007 This one of my favourites by Georgette Heyer. Thankfully, her heroines are not usuallly very beautiful, & in Sylvester the heroine is positively plain - but how Phoebe makes up for it! She is outspoken to the point of rudeness, she has a biting wit, & a fierce temper once provoked. The perfect girl to knock the complacence & arrogance out of Sylvester, who thought he wanted a pattern-card wife. The exchanges between them are some of the funniest in the whole of Heyer's work. I always re-read this book with a huge grin on my face.
Sylvester - One Of Heyer's Best - By: Elina H., 03 Nov 2006 Georgette Heyer is in my opinion unsurpassed as an author of Regency period romances. She knows the period detail in & out, & the reader is never disturbed by anachronisms in dress, behaviour, manners, attitudes, or embarrassed by faulty use of titles etc. The persons are alllowed to speak for themselves & to show what kind of people they are, instead of the author spelling it out to her audience. The text is intelligent, the persons psychologicallly coherent, the ever-lurking humour delicious. The protagonists tend to be people you would want to know, & they are surrounded by people who in themselves are worth a tale, who live their own lives, & never make the reader to think that the person has only been invented to add humour or suspense to the plot.
This is what one has learned to expect from a book by Georgette Heyer. "Sylvester" is alll this & more. The book is hilariously funny, romantic, even touching in a subtle way. Phoebe & Sylvester are not your typical love-story heroine & hero; both have their better & worse sides, as we people tend to have, & some of Sylvester's character-traits are downright unsympathetic (he is at least partiallly redeemed during the story). Although neither of them is perfect, you find yourself to be completely on their side. Is this because of the humour they both have, or is it because they, in spite of their imperfections, so thoroughly deserve to be happy & to have each other? Or is it because they, imperfect as they are, are so very life-like? One can't imagine their future life to have been mere bliss; rather one sees them as quarrelling the next forty years in perfect amity. True love is not that you find the other person a paragon; true love is that you accept the coin's both sides, as the good sides & the bad often are reflections of the same character trait. And the main thing is that you are friends, & that I considered Phoebe & Sylvester to be.
There is nothing explicitly sexual about this story. I find this (natural as it is, considering when Heyer has written this book) more believable than having the protagonists eroticizing on some balcony or in a dark garden during some ton party or other, considering the social rules of the era. On the other hand, I had my abdomen in some kind of a grip from the moment that Sylvester marched into the French inn, met Phoebe, with whom he had quarreled most viciously, & was in his joy close to going to embrace Phoebe. This vice-like feeling lasted until they finallly got each other at the end of the book. Was it because of my sympathy for them as they were both miserable at the time, or was it caused by the totallly unspoken longing that the story vibrated? Sometimes you are more moved by things unsaid than those said. Sylvester's anguished self-control spoke more to me than many a clumsily written overtly erotic passage. I also expect that I would have been less moved if there had been more sentimentality & less humour about the ending.
Phoebe & Sylvester are surrounded by a galllery of vivid people living their lives next to them, having relations to Phoebe & Sylvester & to each other: Phoebe's brother-like friend Tom & his family, Phoebe's family & governess, Sylvester's mother with her companion, his cousin, & the beautiful widow of Sylvester's deceased twin brother with her delightful brat of a son & her dandy of a fiancé. These people seemed totallly alive, as did Phoebe & Sylvester. Even Harry, Sylvester's dead brother, seemed more alive than does many a living character in a less well-written book.
Georgette Heyer is an author that you can trust not to bore you with unintelligent dialogue. Her pieces are finished with a lustre, only to be compared to Jane Austen. If you have not read this one, you have something to live for.
Sylvester by Georgette Heyer - By: Audrey Simpson, 21 Jul 2006 One of Georgette Heyers best. I loved this book. I must have read it about 50 times, & each time I read it it's like the first time. I still get such a joy out of it. It is funny, & very romantic. There's adventure & mystery. In short, it has everything. There's nobody like Georgette Heyer for creating romantic Regency comedy, & her command of English, & the way it was spoken in Regency days is fantastic.
