Georgette Heyer

by Jennifer Kloester

  Georgette’s feelings about her mother at this time are not easy to discern, but what little evidence there is suggests that it was a complex and changeable bond which was affectionate enough in the early years but which became increasingly ambivalent as Georgette grew older. Her brother Frank described their mother as a “Victorian puritan who instinctively thought it wrong to enjoy things,” whereas Georgette loved to laugh and liked going out to the opera and the cinema or to dances with friends. Sylvia did have a sense of humor, however, and one which could be surprisingly ribald at times. Once she and Georgette had a hilarious conversation about Sylvia becoming an “entrepreneur” and Georgette a call girl, an unlikely vision which made them both laugh uproariously. Such moments were uncommon, however, for Sylvia’s tendency to pessimism led her family to christen her “Mrs. Gummidge” after the mournful character in Dickens’s David Copperfield.

  Sylvia was devastated by her husband’s death. Quite apart from the emotional trauma, his death left her with limited finances and a daughter and two sons still dependent on her. She had neither the temperament nor the means to support her family. Although Boris was almost eighteen and now the “man of the house,” he would never be able to provide for his mother, brother, and sister. He was not clever like Georgette and he suffered from mood swings which made him “mercurial and unpredictable, one day a riot of fun, the next morose and silent.”

  Frank was only thirteen when his father died. He had been three when George had gone to war and seven when he came home. Two years after his father’s return from France, Frank had gone to board at The Wick Preparatory School in Hove. He spent five years there and never got to know his father as Georgette and Boris had. Frank’s recollection of George was of a stern parent—although Georgette always insisted this was their father playing a joke. Frank was in the next room preparing for the scholarship examination to Lancing when his father died. Whatever their relationship, it was hard for a boy to lose his father and at thirteen there was little Frank could do to help his mother. Sylvia would always make her children feel guilty about her loss. The comfortable life she had known with George ended abruptly when he died and it cannot have helped that for the rest of her life she would be financially dependent on her daughter.

  In July Georgette and Ronald’s engagement was announced in The Times. On Tuesday, 18 August 1925, two days after her twenty-third birthday, they were married at St. Mary’s Parish Church, Wimbledon. It was a quiet, simple wedding without bridesmaids or page boys and with only their families and closest friends in attendance. Georgette wore an elegant square-necked dress, fur-trimmed cloak, and a low-brimmed cloche hat with a swooping osprey feather. She carried an enormous bouquet of three dozen roses. Ronald was handsome in his morning suit with a silk tie, spats, and a white carnation in his buttonhole. Georgette missed her father keenly on her wedding day and photographs show her looking somber, despite the occasion.

  After the ceremony, she and Ronald, with her mother and his father, moved to the vestry where they each signed the register. Their marriage certificate records Ronald’s occupation as “mining engineer” but there is only a line through the box headed “rank or profession” against Georgette’s name. The omission may have been a reflection of her uncertainty about her future as a writer. A sense of ambivalence about her writing after her father’s death would not have been surprising. Georgette’s usual way of dealing with strong feelings was to write them down, to give them character and voice and let her fictional creations carry some of her emotion for her. But now she struggled to write for the burden of grief stifled lighthearted prose.

  However, only grave illness or death would prevent Georgette from fulfilling her contractual obligations. Committed to Heinemann for a second book, she returned to These Old Shades, the unfinished manuscript she had put away three years earlier. It was difficult. Later, in Helen, she would describe her heroine’s struggles to return to an unfinished novel after her father’s sudden death: “She unearthed the manuscript from the bottom of her trunk, and sat down to read it. It was very hard to do this; Marchant’s pencilled corrections occurred again and again: more acutely than ever did she feel the need of him; she had to force herself to continue.” At first, Helen finds it difficult to write but she perseveres even in the face of “spells of hopeless depression” and a sense of purposelessness in writing a book her father will never read. She gradually finds her ability is not lost, however, and that there is still joy to be found in writing: “It was a different pleasure she had in it now, lacking the exuberance she had felt before, but she was relieved to find that there was still pleasure in the work.” Like Helen, Georgette rediscovered her enjoyment of writing and even the cruelest tragedy could not deprive her of her ability to write comedy.

  Published the year after her father’s death it has always been assumed that Georgette began These Old Shades in 1925 and that, as Jane Aiken Hodge put it, she was “writing with an easy pen that first year of her marriage.” In the absence of evidence to the contrary it was a reasonable assumption—especially since the book is a riveting historical romance full of lighthearted prose. Reading These Old Shades it is difficult to imagine its author beset by grief and struggling to write, but Georgette’s pen was anything but easy in the difficult months after her father’s death. “I haven’t started another book,” she confessed to her agent in November, “but I’m trying to. I think it will be modern. I don’t think I have the heart to write a period novel. But that’s ‘slop,’ and I don’t think you ought to be worried with it.”

  The period novel would always be a form of escape for her; a pleasurable experience in which aspects of a world free from care could be remembered and relived and in which she could give full rein to her romantic imagination. Whatever the characters might endure within the pages of the novel, the happy ending was assured, whereas in real life, tragedy and loss could not be eradicated with a pen-stroke. Georgette made only one public reference to her father’s death and it was, appropriately, in a book. In October 1925 Heinemann published Simon the Coldheart. In the original American edition the book’s dedication had been to Georgette’s friend Doreen Arbuthnot. When the first British edition of Simon appeared, it had a new dedication. It read: “To the memory of my father—this, his favorite.”

  Georgette was not only wrestling with the return to her writing that autumn and winter, but also with other, more prosaic, challenges. Back in London after their honeymoon, she and Ronald moved into a flat in South Kensington at 27 Hogarth Road. After the wilds of Nigeria and months in a tent, Ronald coped easily with the more cramped quarters, but Georgette had only ever lived in a flat for the few months spent in Paris as a child, and it took her a little time to adjust. She also had to deal with domesticity for the first time on her own, planning the meals, doing the shopping and some of the cooking, managing the household accounts, and dealing with the daily “help.”

  Some of it was fun and she enjoyed the new independence which marriage brought; Ronald was a comfortable partner but their relationship was not without its occasional frictions and there were adjustments to be made. They were both strong-minded and forthright in their opinions and it was not always easy to learn forbearance and to be patient with each other’s habits and idiosyncrasies. Money was another persistent pressure, especially as Ronald (who apparently had some form of income though its source is not known) was helping to support Sylvia and Boris. The Wimbledon house had been sold and Georgette’s mother had moved into rooms at 130 Queen’s Gate, just north of the Cromwell Road and less than a mile from her daughter’s flat.

  Sylvia found it difficult to settle into her new life. She moved to five different addresses in South Kensington over the next five years. She would spend the rest of her life living in hotels and rented rooms. Life for a genteel, middle-class widow with limited means and two sons to think of was not easy in 1920s Britain. A scholarship had ensured Frank went to Lancing in September but Boris was often unwell and would never be stron
g. His erratic moods also meant that (as one relative described him to me) he was “like so many of Chekhov’s characters, pretty useless at making a living.” Boris had taken a job at Bovril on leaving school but had not liked it and eventually persuaded his mother to let him give it up. Throughout his life, he would need some support and it was Georgette who took on this responsibility and assisted her brother whenever the need arose.

  By January 1926, she was worrying about money to the point where she told Moore that the sale of an option on Simon the Coldheart to the Fox-Film Co. “has become acute with me now! A lump sum would relieve the tension considerably, for two establishments are so expensive for poor Ronald!” The film deal did not materialize. She and Sylvia could have reduced living expenses by sharing accommodation, but Georgette’s financial worries would never convince her to move in with her mother.

  Toward the end of 1925 Georgette had begun to think about her writing again. On 1 December she joined the London Library, a private subscription library established in 1841 by the writer and historian Thomas Carlyle. Located in the heart of fashionable London at 14 St. James’s Square, the London Library’s modest façade still conceals an elegant Victorian interior with polished wooden desks and comfortable red leather wing-chairs set before the (now defunct) fireplace in the reading room. Portraits of past presidents line the walls and members thumb through the enormous guard book catalogues before entering the stacks. It was the sort of setting that exactly suited Georgette. She borrowed from the Library until December 1926, when she let her membership lapse because she and Ronald were planning to leave England for several years.

  Ronald had not found it easy to find suitable employment in London and his experiences in Nigeria had made him keen to obtain work overseas again. A few weeks before Christmas Georgette wrote cheerfully to Moore about the possibility of Ronald getting a job in Mexico. She described the opportunity as “rather fun, don’t you think?” and told her agent that she would “be able to write blood and thunder short stories!” Two months later she wrote again to say that, instead of going to Mexico, she was to be a “grass widow.” Ronald had been offered a position with an American mining company and would be sailing for the Caucasus in a week. Georgette would remain alone in London until she could join him in Russia. It was a daunting proposition, but she faced it with her usual stoicism and wrote a long, positive letter to her agent telling him all about the opportunity.

  Ronald’s new job was with the British arm of the Georgian Manganese Company. The American firm had a twenty-year mining concession from the Soviet government to take manganese from the ore-rich canyons in Tchiatouri (Chiatura) in central Georgia. It was an excellent opportunity for a young engineer, though Ronald did not relish the prospect of a lengthy separation so soon after marriage. Georgette hoped to go to Tchiatouri in the autumn and wrote Moore a long letter describing the challenge of filling out innumerable forms in Russian and the censorship rules laid down by the Bolshevik government:

  My manuscripts would all be confiscated if I didn’t first get them sealed here by the Soviet censor! Fancy having to get permission to take your own works out. God knows how I shall send them out of the country. We hope that our firm will manage it for me. And it seems likely that you will have to address envelopes to me in Russian!…And as letters will probably be censored I shan’t be able to tell anyone that the Bolsheviks are a filthy crowd, and no one will be able to ask me about the state of Russia, so I expect I shall have to stick to history. They won’t mind that, but they might be very suspicious of a modern book. But what an experience! I am greatly looking forward to it, as you may imagine.

  Ronald sailed for Russia on 22 January 1926. The last stage of his trip began in Tiflis (Tbilisi) at midnight, and he endured eleven hours by rail and road to reach Tchiatouri. Despite the beautiful scenery, the final destination was beyond anything he could have imagined. Situated along the Kvirila River, more than six hundred meters up on the steep sides of the canyon, Tchiatouri was best known for its mud—described by one employee as “unspeakably slimy and slippery.” Ronald soon learned that Tchiatouri was suffocatingly hot in the summer and freezing in the winter. By the time he had been there a month, the weather was changing daily from rain to snow to drizzle and he, like others, had concluded that the place was “impossible.”

  Living conditions in Tchiatouri for the English personnel were adequate but limited and Ronald shared the only large house in the mining town with twenty British and American workers. New housing was promised for employees and their families but building had begun only recently and Georgette could not hope to join Ronald until there was suitable accommodation. She found it “horrible to be separated” but was gradually returning to her writing. She had not started a new novel but her compulsion to write found an outlet in regular letters and in what she called “young books…all about nothing” which she penned and sent to Ronald for his entertainment.

  He returned from the Caucasus in June with no plans to go back. Even in its best months, Tchiatouri was a difficult environment and Ronald’s time at the site had convinced him that it was no place for his wife. He had not given up on an overseas career, however. Soon after his return to England he decided to go back to Africa and seek his fortune as an independent prospector. He had heard that there were good mining prospects in the tin fields of Tanganyika (Tanzania). His earlier experiences in Africa encouraged him to think that he and Georgette might live quite happily there while he attempted to find a rich mineral strike and make their fortune. Ronald sailed for Tanganyika in the autumn of 1926 with plans for Georgette to join him there early in the new year.

  She was fully occupied in those last few months of 1926 before her departure for Africa. As well as her writing, there were her mother and Boris and Frank to think of, the flat to be vacated, banking arrangements finalized, and the packing completed. She had finished writing These Old Shades while Ronald was in Tchiatouri and it was published on 21 October. It had not been an easy year for publishers, with the General Strike in May and the continuing coal strike which had affected paper supplies and production until October, when the stoppage was finally ended. Carola Oman’s new novel, King Heart, had come out the week before the General Strike began and her book had suffered badly from a lack of reviews and advertising. Georgette fared better with These Old Shades, which was published six months later, long after the General Strike was over (only the miners remained on strike), when the disruption was much less. The novel had an initial print run of three thousand copies with an extra fifteen hundred copies for export to Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.

  The first indication that she had written something out of the ordinary came from Australia where the novel sold well from the first. An Australian librarian wrote to her to congratulate her on the book and to tell her she was “a bonzer woman” and that “all the girls who read the filthiest books like yours.” An unusual accolade, but with These Old Shades Georgette had brought something new to historical romance. She had created a female protagonist who was not simply a passive victim of adversity but an active, energetic force, determining her own destiny. Where other bestselling novels (including Dell’s Charles Rex) frequently featured heroines as panting, tortured females doomed to suffer, Georgette’s heroine, Léonie, is never cowed or broken down by the events that beset her. Throughout the novel she remains feisty, courageous, and endearing, with an espièglerie and a sense of humor that enables her to behave in a manner quite unlike that of the traditional heroine, who was so often ready to faint in a moment of crisis.

  In America the novel was Georgette’s last publication with Small Maynard, but in Britain it was reprinted in November 1926 and again in January, May, August, and November 1927. These Old Shades was Georgette’s first decided success but, as her son explained years later: “No one knew anything about her when she first made her name because she was abroad with my father.”

  9

  If he wishes to praise the book, what author yet fai
led to lap up encomiums gratefully? Not this imperfect soul!

  —Georgette Heyer

  On 18 December 1926 Georgette said goodbye to her mother and brothers and sailed for Africa with her pet Sealyham terrier, Roddy. It must have been something of a relief to get away after the emotional upheavals of the past eighteen months. The weather was fine as the ship took her east across the Mediterranean to the Suez Canal and south to the Port of Sudan. She arrived in the Red Sea in time for the new year and took photographs of the bustling ports and the Arab dhows, which plied their trade between Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Everything was new and different. Shipboard life was pleasant and uncomplicated, with no one to make demands on her. Here she was not Georgette Heyer, up-and-coming author, but Mrs. Ronald Rougier traveling out to meet her husband in East Africa. There was respite in this and freedom from the cares and responsibilities which had been her lot since her father’s death. She celebrated Christmas and New Year’s Eve on the ship and wrote enthusiastic letters home to her family and to Carola Oman, describing the voyage and the many fascinating sights.

  When the ship arrived in Mombasa early in January, Ronald was on shore to greet her. It was a glad reunion and they spent some time in the town to give Georgette a chance to acclimatize. Everything around her was lush and green, with palm trees and dirt roads and hills and mountains in the distance, all quite unlike the views at home. After a short break she and Ronald took the train to Nairobi where they stocked up on last-minute items—none of which would be available at their final destination. From Nairobi the train took them north and west to Jinja, a Ugandan port town on the northern shore of Lake Victoria. The train journey took several days but there was plenty to see and Ronald had time to tell her about the district of Karagwe, and about Kyerwa where they would live.