glimpse of medieval life – court intrigues as well as the lives of ordinary people are part of the story. Furthermore, while near to major historical players, John's apartness from power allows Heyer to create a fuller depiction of his life without having to change major historical events. Release and reception Heyer's family published My Lord John in 1975, a year after Heyer's death. Several days after its release, A. S. Byatt reported that The Bodley Head "have received their biggest paperback offer ever" for the novel. That publishing company released the novel in the United Kingdom, while its American release was handled by Dutton, a company based in New York. A German translation was released in 1980. In the period immediately following its publication, the novel received fourteen professional reviews – a number much larger than most of her other works. Critics gave largely negative reviews, and Mary Fahnestock-Thomas writes that "many fans [found My Lord John] virtually unreadable." The year of its release in 1975, Library Journal contributor Eleanore Singer praised it for being "well-documented historical writing," though she felt that "as a novel, it doesn't have enough dramatic or narrative flow to keep it from being often boring." Singer added that My Lord John "falls far short of that superb blending of history and compelling storytelling that characterizes successful examples of the genre." Jane Aiken Hodge of History Today, while praising Heyer's Regency novels as "triumphs of a language that never was on sea or land," thought that My Lord John was "less successful." The language of the novel, Aiken Hodge said, was grating and "scattered with too lavish a hand," with words like lordings and bel sire. Aiken Hodge also felt that while it contained "some happy moments of unmistakable Heyer humour," it failed to contain enough to "hold a young reader for long." R.M. Franklin of The Times Literary Supplement opined that because the novel ended before the "most interesting parts of John of Bedford's career," it "has an air of anticlimax about it, and more than once themes are indicated which vanish inexplicably." In a 2008 contribution for The Times, Hilary Rose praised Heyer's Regency novels but found My Lord John to be "oddly difficult, possibly on account of it being concerned more with medieval history than masquerade balls at Vauxhall Gardens." Writing for Tor.com in 2012, Mari Ness opined that while Heyer hoped