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 at that time 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 strained “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 her historical knowledge was probably limited, so 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 achieving.  It isn’t as polished and good as her later novels, but it is still very readable and the faults don’t take away from the energy and wit with which it was written.

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 but whose work has not remained so popular); who also planned to write for a living, with whom she could discuss her work and plans. 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, perhaps 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, which he had always wanted to do.  He had tried his hand at a couple of other jobs, such as running a shop, but 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 so as to help her husband and then her siblings and her elderly widowed mother.  She gradually became more reclusive, and refused to do any PR for her books insisting 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 with them, but she seems to have withdrawn from most other socialising and spent more of her time with her husband, mother and brothers... for company.  Always conservative minded, she became more and 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 didn’t feel were necessary.  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.   But Heyer was so busy with her work that it’s said that he felt a bit left out and ignored by his Mother and their relationship wasn’t always easy.

In addition to her financial commitments to help her family, she was personally rather extravagant and not very good with managing money, so 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.  However, she gave up writing them when she was more financially secure.  She used her husband for advice on the legal and mechanical 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, a lot of excitement and adventure and improbable plots.  They are built around events such as abductions, duels, quarrels, and people pretending to be someone else, or even “swapping gender”.  In The Masquerades,   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 large sturdily built girl, is Peter.   Robin seems to make a convincing young lady,  and Prudence has to pose as  a man and “hold her own” with young bucks of the town…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” than they could have had, within the confines of upper class propriety at the time.  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.
End of Part I