Shakespeare has women being funny and scoring off the male lead - okay, sometimes she has to be disguised as a boy to do so, but not always - e.g. Beatrice in Much Ado.

There's also, more contemporaneous with Heyer, screwball comedy, in which the women were cracking wise at least as fast as the men and sometimes faster.

And while Rebecca West probably didn't mean it as a courtship strategy, it was her pointing and mocking in the columns of The Freewoman (which is take-no-prisoners hilarious, so much for suffragettes being dour and humourless) that first aroused HG Wells' interest (this probably counts as an Awful Warning, actually).