When I think of plots in romantic fiction, I think of neatly crafted storylines. So, to take one shining example, a duke is accosted in the street by an urchin, whom he takes on to be his page. The page proves to be a girl not a boy, and also the disowned daughter of a count who is made to pay for his dishonesty. After making her his ward, the duke finally marries the count’s daughter. All of this can be found in These Old Shades, one of Georgette Heyer’s most brilliant and compelling historical romances, interestingly set well before the more popular Regency period. One might object that the heroine is inherently powerless, the hero seemingly infallible, but the plot hinges relatively simply on identity, in gender and rank. No matter how pretty and charming she might have been, this duke would not have married an urchin.
Our standard idea of a plot often includes a resolution which we enjoy as a solution to a puzzle, such as the right people getting it together at the end, the righting of a wrong, the solving of a crime, and so on. And – as romance bloggers have insisted in writing about what they do – one of the standard
features of a romantic plot is some kind of reversal, with the hero and heroine changing from dislike to love, much as Beatrice and Benedick in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, one of the most eminent models for this kind of fiction; or overcoming some major obstacle to achieve their union, which has its eighteenth-century ancestor in the truly horrendous, ‘gothic’ difficulties placed in the way of Anne Radcliffe’s heroines and heroes.
In romantic fiction, these changes are now called ‘tropes’, and they are there to ensure that we get the resolution we would like. So the main thing about a plot is, quite regularly, our confidence as readers that it is heading in a certain direction – we can be sure that Tom Jones will be bound to end up with Sophia, no matter what comes along in between, in Fielding’s great novel, and even in the complex plots of nineteenth-century blockbusters something tells us quite early on that certain characters will win through, or – in other cases – that sadly or tragically they will never make it.
In general, we probably accept that the plot is substantially the author’s contrivance, and you can either agree to be made miserable by Thomas Hardy or to be cheered by Jane Austen. But in fact as readers our sense of the direction of a plot may also take in the contrivances of characters. In These Old Shades, the veiled and indeed hooded eyes of the duke from the beginning conceal the germ of a plot of his own making – one that aims to determine the identity of his young page, whom he suspects from the outset to be a young woman; to unravel the plot of her father in disowning her; and then to hatch a plot of his own, which will restore the heroine to her mother at least and bring
revenge down on her father. So ‘plotting’ is not just left to the author, but is delegated to characters, to get on with as best they may, and some characters will be shown to be expert at it, others even unaware that such cleverness can exist or be expected to have a positive outcome.
Yet there is another side to that, because in life as we know it so many plans and intentions, so much scheming and wilful inclination, and so much deception and overpowering manipulation fail to achieve the ends their initiators have in mind for them. This is as dreadfully true of military actions, such as the misconceived and poorly executed invasion at Quiberon in the summer of 1795 (in The Baron Returns), as it is of attempts made to restrict the designs of an unscrupulous rake without occasioning unintended harm to others (in Heir to the Manor).
So I would put some trust in the idea that ‘plots’ may come together from things that go completely wrong as well as things that go just about right, as I believe that Jane Austen knew very well, and I would add another thought which convinces me as a writer: it may be that we see more of characters when they are working their way through a world that never quite goes the way they
want, when the ‘plotting’ which we all do, innocently or wickedly, cannot fully be relied upon.
Graham Ley 