Georgette Heyer Part I

Georgette Heyer, queen of Regency novelists, inventor of the genre, was born in Wimbledon in 1902. She was from a middle class family, not very rich, but like most middle class people of the time, very status conscious. She had a good education, but like most girls, she did not attend university. She always wanted to be a writer, and in her teens she wrote the story that became her first historical romance, “The Black Moth." It was set in Georgian England and was typical of her early work in that it had rather “archaic” language, culled from other novelists such as Baroness Orczy and Jeffery Farnol. It was highly adventurous, with duels, drama, card games for high stakes, and a villain who kidnaps the heroine, intending to force her to marry him. It is less historically accurate than most of her later works. She was very young, and she concerned herself mostly with writing a good rollicking story to amuse her young brother who was ill. A few years later, she revised the story and it was published as her first novel. For such a young writer, it was quite an achievement. It isn’t as polished and good as her later novels, but it is still very readable. Her family were far from rich and she needed to earn a living. She had friends, including Carola Oman and Joanna Cannan, (both of whom were successful novelists); who also planned to write for a living. Writing had become a respectable career for a middle class girl…or even an upper class woman in need of money. One didn’t need formal training or a university education, and it was work which could be done after marriage. Her father who had taught at Kings College, London, had ensured she had been well educated, for her time. She had also met with other young women who had similar interests. “Black Moth” was a success, and she went on writing and for some years, she produced different sorts of novels. She wrote 4 contemporary novels based on her “real life at the time”, which she later removed from publication. As a young woman, she was attractive, not conventionally pretty, but dark and smart-looking and she enjoyed a social life. As she grew older, she became almost reclusive, except for the sort of social events that were expected from the wife of a professional man. In 1925, she married Ronald Rougier, a mining engineer. Her beloved father died suddenly just before the wedding. But her marriage was a success. She and Ronald were married for almost 50 years and were devoted to each other. However, he was not rich and she went on with her writing, to help him financially. Some years into their marriage, he decided to give up his work, and train for the Bar. Georgette became the main wage earner and supported them during his training. She also had brothers who were not very successful with money and found herself helping them out financially as well. She loved her work but she undoubtedly developed a feeling at times of being burdened with financial commitments. She gradually became more reclusive, and refused to do any PR for her books. She felt that her private life was private and that it was not necessary to give interviews or talk about herself, in order to sell her works. When her husband qualified as a barrister, he had social commitments that he had to comply with, relating to his Bar work. Georgette was willing to do these, but she seems to have withdrawn from most other socialising. Always conservative minded, she became more right wing. She didn’t care for the Welfare State, feeling that she worked very hard, and brought a lot of money into the UK, only for the government to take it and waste it on social programmes. She had a son, Richard, in 1932 - her only child -and tried to ensure that he had a good education. He later followed his father into the legal profession. In addition to her financial commitments to help her family, she was personally rather extravagant and not very good with managing money. She was often hit with tax bills that meant she had to write something in a hurry to pay a bill. She wrote several detective stories the 1920s and 30s. She gave up writing them when she was more financially secure. She used her husband for advice on the legal side and the collaboration was a lot less successful than with her historical works. However the detective novels were reasonably popular and sold well. Her romances sold much better. Heyer’s first novels were set mainly in Georgian times, and were rather like the Black Moth, in having distinctive and dastardly villains. They are built around events such as abductions, duels, quarrels, and people pretending to be someone else, or even “swapping gender”. In The Masqueraders, Robin and Prudence Tremayne, brother and sister, are on the run because of his participation in the Jacobite Rising, and they have to disguise themselves, to avoid detection. Robin, who is small and slim, poses as a woman, Kate and Prudence, a sturdily built girl, is Peter. There are other times in early Heyer where her leading lady dresses and poses as a boy, Penelope in “The Corinthian” and Leonie, In “These Old Shades”. Heyer was a somewhat “male oriented” woman, preferring masculine company... she enjoyed being with her brothers and her husband, and her father, though she did have some close female friends. In her early writings, she disguised some of her female characters as boys, so that they could have more freedom to “roam around and have adventures”. Later books abandoned this sort of plot, and her women were more realistic. Even if they had masculine interests such as riding or shooting, they had their fair share of feminine wiles and were usually good housekeepers.