Authorial attitude is definitely a matter of taste! I'm sure some people find D. K. Broster too sentimental, but her care for her characters even while she's putting them through awful plot things is one of my favourite things about her writing, and I tend to dislike authors who go very far in the other direction. Oh well, Heyer is clearly good at things besides the heroes—although the romance let it down for me, there was a lot of other stuff to like in this one.