Other Fiction Farnol, Jeffery: Our Admirable Betty. V1. 22-Jul-2011

[weatherwax]

John Jeffery Farnol (10 February 1878 – 9 August 1952), was an English author, known for his many romantic novels, some formulaic and set in the English Regency period, and swashbucklers. He with Georgette Heyer founded the Regency romantic genre; one of his first books, The Broad Highway, has been issued in a version edited by Barbara Cartland.
He was born in Aston, Birmingham, and brought up in London and Kent. He attended the Westminster Art School, after he had lost his job in a Birmingham metal-working firm. In 1900, he married Blanche Hawley, daughter of the noted New York scenic artist Hughson Hawley; they moved to the United States, where he found work as a scene painter.
The success of his early novels led Farnol to become a professional writer; he returned to England around 1910, and settled on the south coast. He produced around 40 novels and volumes of stories, and some non-fiction and children's books. He died after a long battle with cancer. His last book was completed by his second wife Phyllis (née Clarke), whom he had married in 1938.

If you like Georgette Heyer style books, you'll also like Jeffery Farnol.

Excerpt:
"The Major, mam, the Major has a truly wonderful 'ead!" said Sergeant Zebedee Tring as he stood, hammer in hand, very neat and precise from broad shoe-buckles to smart curled wig that offset his square, bronzed face.
"Head, Sergeant, head!" retorted pretty, dimpled Mrs. Agatha, nodding at the Sergeant's broad back.
"'Ead mam, yes!" said the Sergeant, busily nailing up a branch of the Major's favourite cherry tree. "The Major has a truly wonderful 'ead, regarding which I take liberty to ob-serve as two sword-cuts and a spent bullet have in nowise affected it, Mrs. Agatha, mam, which is a fact as I will maintain whenever and wherever occasion demands, as in dooty bound mam, dooty bound."
"Duty, Sergeant, duty!"
"Dooty, mam—pre-cisely." Here the Sergeant turning round for another nail, Mrs. Agatha bent over the rose-bush, her busy fingers cutting a bloom here and another there and her pretty face quite hidden in the shade of her mob-cap.
"Indeed," she continued, after a while, "'tis no wonder you be so very—fond of him, Sergeant!"
"Fond of him, mam, fond of him," said the Sergeant turning to look at her with glowing eyes, "well—yes, I suppose so—it do be a—a matter o' dooty with me—dooty, Mrs. Agatha, mam."

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[BelleZora]

The Outlook (New Books Reviews), September 25, 1918:

Our Admirable Betty. By Jeffery Farnol. Little, Brown & Co., Boston $1.00

A joyous romance in England in the eighteenth century, with villains, duels, highwaymen, fashionable gallants, the devotion of an honest but unfashionable soldier to the charming and willful Betty, and a course of true love which runs far from smoothly but ends happily.