Black Sheep (1966)
Black Sheep is a 1966 1960s book written by Georgette Heyer.
Abigail Wendover is clever, handsome, and past the age when Bath society expects a woman to marry, and content to stay that way until her naive niece Fanny loses her head over Stacy Calverleigh, a charming fortune-hunter. Determined to break the match, Abigail finds an unlikely ally in Stacy's uncle Miles, the black sheep of his family, who returned from India with a fortune and no patience for polite convention. His blunt manners appall her. His knack for making her laugh at the wrong moment unsettles her more. Georgette Heyer sets their sparring in the drawing rooms and pump rooms of Regency Bath.
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A few thoughts on Black Sheep
For the same Regency wit and courtship between two sharp-tongued equals, try Autumn de Wilde's film Emma, all pastel drawing rooms and mismatched matchmaking. Persuasion, also set partly in Bath, shares the older, wiser heroine and the second chance at love that Georgette Heyer's Abigail quietly hopes for.
Regency romances where the couple argues its way to the altar
Abigail Wendover and Miles Calverleigh spend most of Black Sheep insulting each other across Bath drawing rooms, and Heyer treats the insults as the courtship. These Regency novels work the same way. A couple meets, disagrees about something small, then argues for three hundred pages while the reader watches them fall for the argument.
Heroines the marriage market gave up on
Bath society decided years ago that Abigail Wendover would not marry, and Black Sheep opens with her declining to mind. Each of these gives you a woman her neighbours filed away as finished: a second chance arriving ten years late, a novelist who stayed single, a widow with her own income. None of these frames the late match as second best.
Charming fortune hunters working a rich family
Stacy Calverleigh courts a seventeen-year-old heiress with excellent manners and an empty bank account, and half of Black Sheep is Abigail trying to prove it before the settlement papers arrive. These stories follow the charmer rather than the guardian: adventuresses climbing through drawing rooms, poor relations calculating a marriage, con artists reading a rich household for its weak spot.
Costume drama to watch after a Heyer novel
Heyer built Black Sheep out of Regency furniture: pump rooms, morning calls, an aunt managing a niece's reputation in public while arguing with a man in private. These adaptations put that same machinery on screen. Watch for the scenes where nobody says the important thing out loud and the whole room understands it anyway.