Georgette Heyer (1902-74)
Georgette Heyer was born in Wimbledon in 1902, to a middle class family. Her father was a great influence in her life and she was very close to him. During the war, he worked as a requisitions officer for the British Army. He left the army in 1920 and then taught at Kings College London.
Georgette was highly intelligent but came from a class where girls weren’t always well educated and not many of them went for a university education. She had 2 brothers Boris and Frank. Some of her friends including Carola Oman and Joanna Cannan, became novelists as well.
At the age of 15 or 16, she wrote a story to amuse her brother who was recuperating after an illness. She was a natural writer, even at that age and a few years later, in 1921 the story was published as her first novel “The Black Moth”. It was set in Georgian England, and many of her earlier novels were “Georgian”. (She also wrote a few set in the Elizabethan or medieval era, such as Beauvallet, Simon the Coldheart and The Conqueror).
From the early 1930s, she began to set more of her works during the period of the Regency. Her earlier novels were probably based on the model of such authors as Jeffery Farnol, a well-known historical novelist of the time. They were rather full of “fake period language”, known as “Tushery”. But Heyer was too intelligent to remain an imitator.
As she began to write in the Regency period, she embarked on research into the era, which made her something of an expert, at least on “High Society”, of the time. She lacked a university education, and had a strong conservative bias, but she did accumulate a vast treasury of knowledge. She created the genre of “Regency Romance” and now many thousands of writers, mostly women, publish in this field.
She met Ronald Rougier, a mining engineer and married him in 1925. Her beloved father died suddenly just before the marriage. Rougier was not very well off and Heyer continued with her writing, to add to their income. She also helped to support her brothers, and mother, and later on, when her brothers were not very good at making money, she still assisted them and their families.
After their marriage, Ronald went out to Tanganyika to work on a mining project. Heyer went with him and continued her writing. She was the only white woman for miles around at the time. Later, they were together in Macedonia, where Heyer almost died, after having a dental anaesthetic that went wrong. In 1932 her son Richard was born, her only child.
Besides her historical romances, she also wrote detective fiction, like other women writers of the Golden Age, such as Dorothy L Sayers, Margery Allingham and others. She and Ronald collaborated on the detective stories, with him providing murder methods and advising her on legal issues.
Her detective works are not her best novels. They were done to make money and after some years she gave up, in order to concentrate on her historical novels. She claimed however that the Regency was not her favourite historical period and that she preferred the “Age of Iron”, the medieval age. During her later life, she worked intermittently on a medieval historical novel, which was published after her death, as “My Lord John”. She claimed that this was something she always wanted to do, but that she had to write the Regencies to make money and pay the tax man.
During the 1930s, her husband, having worked at various jobs, gave up in order to study for the Bar which had been his dream. Heyer supported him until he qualified and was making a living in the law. He was called to the Bar in 1939, at the beginning of World War II.
Heyer was somewhat extravagant. She had a lot of expenses with supporting her family but she also had expensive tastes. At the time, many writers found that they had difficulties with taxes, since they were taxed on their previous year’s income and could end up with heavy demands for payment. Heyer was no exception, and was continually frustrated by the need to pay her taxes. She seemed to be unable, in spite of making a very comfortable income, to put aside enough money to avoid problems with the Inland Revenue. So she had to go on writing, and leave her “great work” on hold.
Her regency romances were incredibly popular. She created a world based loosely on Jane Austen, and there are echoes of Austen in many of her books. But she wrote about a richer class than Austen’s country gentry, more about the very rich and titled, who had many estates, houses in London, and were able to spend freely. Her characters were more tolerant of extra marital affairs and divorces in a way that Jane Austen was not. Her female characters usually do the Season, in London. There is a lot of period detail about clothes, horses, carriages, houses and society events such as balls and assemblies. There is a great deal of comedy, and Heyer was an expert on period slang so she made use of this, in her dialogue. In some novels, such as Unknown Ajax, she also uses Yorkshire dialect as a mine for comedy, since her hero Hugo Darracott, was brought up in Yorkshire, with the local accent. His maternal family were nouveau riche millers – so he has also imbibed Yorkshire expressions, which horrify his father’s aristocratic family, when he becomes heir to the family title.
In her earlier works, she used such exciting and melodramatic scenarios as elopements, carriage chases, fake engagements, duels, fights and people swapping identities, and even gender,(such as the Masqueraders) but in the later works, she relied more on much less dramatic happenings. Her plots involved small social blunders, the details of a young girl’s coming out. Her heroes were more likely to be devoted to farming their estates than to be fighting duels or being ornaments to society. One of her best novels, A Civil Contract, is set in the year between 1814-15. The heroine is plain Jenny Chawleigh, daughter of a rich City merchant who has risen from poverty to vast wealth through trade. Jenny is not a beauty, or a charming young lady; she is homely, shy and rather awkward. She marries Adam Deveril, Viscount Lynton, because he has to pay off his late father’s huge debts and save his family home. Her kind heart and practical good sense allows her to settle into her role as Viscountess and lady of the family manor... and to win Adam’s love. The contrast between the well-bred, gentle and gentlemanly Adam Deveril and the gloriously vulgar and amusing Jonathan Chawleigh, Jenny’s father, is hilarious and heart-warming.
Heyer was very conservative and increasingly disliked the modern era. She disliked heavy taxation and socialist governments. She used her books as an escape. She was a hard working and conscientious writer and continued to work at her writing to the end of her life. She also disliked publicising her books. She did not wish to give interviews and refused to do “publicity”. She kept her private life private and lived a rather secluded life as she grew older, spending most of her time with her husband, son and her brothers and their family. She took care of her mother in her old age.
Her son Richard followed his father into the legal profeesionand was very successful. He married a divorced lady (who had two sons) in 1960. Heyer’s conservative views made her unhappy with his marrying a divorcee, but she grew to love her daughter in law Susie. Susie gave birth to a son in 1966 who was Heyer’s only grandchild.
As she grew older, Heyer began to suffer health problems and did not write so much, but she continued to produce good novels. Her books had never been popular with the critics, but the longevity of her career, began to make people think again. She became seriously ill in the 70s and died in 1974, of lung cancer. At the time of her death most of her books were still in print and her work has become more and more popular. She is recognised and admired as the founder of the Regency romance genre. She has attracted some critical attention, albeit not as much as she deserves, and many of her works which had fallen out of print have now been re printed. There is a huge appetite for Regency romances and it is a genre that sells particularly well. But most of the writers do not come anywhere close to Heyer!
