Georgette Heyer

by Jennifer Kloester

  Georgette had read Married Love. She had also discussed sex with Joanna Cannan and Carola Oman when writing Instead of the Thorn. Her two married friends had told her enough to enable her to write perceptively about her heroine’s struggle with the physical side of married life. Whether Georgette herself ever experienced an overwhelming urge for sex is impossible to know, although a close friend later described her as “not terribly interested” in sex. She and Ronald only had one child and for much of their married life slept in separate beds, giving little or no impression that physical lovemaking was an intrinsic part of their life together. Georgette had her passions but they were not physical. Her marriage to Ronald was first and foremost a marriage of two minds.

  While theirs was to be a long and happy relationship, Georgette gradually became completely conservative—even reactionary—in her views, and ambivalent about the role and place of women in society. She consistently criticized the feminist stance, and could be vehement in her condemnation of women in business, despite the fact that for most of her life she would be the main family breadwinner. While Georgette was never a feminist in ideology, she was in many ways a feminist by temperament: a strong woman who never questioned her ability or her right to succeed in a patriarchal world—a modern woman in an Edwardian shell. It was this version of the female character that she was to develop most strongly in the novels yet to come.

  Georgette returned to The Convenient Marriage and eventually got past the sticking-point by simply getting on with the writing. As she told Moore: “I’ve something better to do than to write letters to you. There’s that blasted widow, still sitting in the rose-pink and silver boudoir, & Rule’s there too, & I ought to extricate him. You know, it’s a bad business. He’s gone & got engaged to the heroine, & now here he is messing the Massey (note the alliteration) about. I shall have to do something about it.” She always spoke about her literary creations as if they were real people. One of the reasons Georgette’s characters live for her readers is that they lived so vividly for her.

  6 The Empress Club survived until 1952 and closed for good in 1956.

  12

  Since I shall have been (I trust) extremely amusing on paper for a month, there should be little reason why I should not go on being extremely amusing on paper for another month.

  —Georgette Heyer

  They moved into Blackthorns in the second half of 1933 and Georgette immediately began writing her third detective-thriller. Murder on Monday (later renamed The Unfinished Clue) proved rather different from her earlier mysteries, with tighter plotting and far less dependence upon external elements for excitement—gone were the secret passages, foggy nights, and kidnappings. Instead, she wrote plenty of witty dialogue and created a cast of characters guaranteed to heighten the tension even in the calm setting of a country-house weekend. One of the highlights of the book is Lola, a Mexican dancer whose magnificent unconcern for anyone but herself gives rise to a series of funny scenes. The detective is a well-bred policeman whose charm and intelligence might have qualified him for the growing ranks of iconic fictional detectives if Georgette had not ended the novel with him giving up policing.

  The Unfinished Clue appeared in March 1934 and Dorothy L. Sayers wrote a review of it in The Sunday Times which began: “I said last week that good writing would often carry a poor plot, and here is a case in point.” She concluded with a paragraph which must have given Georgette particular pleasure—coming as it did from one of the greatest of all English detective writers:

  And yet, simply because it is written in a perfectly delightful light comedy vein, the book is pure joy from start to finish. Lola, the fiancée, by herself is worth the money, and, indeed, all the characters from the Chief Constable to the Head Parlourmaid, are people we know intimately and appreciatively, from the first words they utter. Miss Heyer has given us a sparkling conversation-piece, rich in chuckles, and all we ask of the plot is that it should keep us going until the comedy is played out.

  Georgette was becoming known for the humor which would set her books apart and help to ensure their longevity.

  Publication of The Unfinished Clue brought renewed concerns about Longmans. The firm had raised her ire when, after sending them the corrected proof pages, Georgette had received “frantic and numerous telephone messages desiring me to inform them where are the proofs?” She hated this sort of inefficiency and once her displeasure was incurred it generally marked the beginning of the end. Georgette could be stubborn where her books were concerned. Although it could take her a long time to make a decision to change an arrangement, once the process was begun it was usually irreversible. She and Moore met at Georgette’s London club, the Empress, where they discussed the matter. She left unappeased. A few months later she began writing Death in the Stocks. It was to be her last novel with Longmans.

  Death in the Stocks was the only one of her detective novels written without Ronald’s input and many people think it her best. In it Georgette gave her comic gifts free rein. This was the first of what she came to call her “real crime stories” and the novel in which she introduced her detective, Superintendent Hannasyde, who would reappear in several of her later mysteries. Although a likeable character, he lacks the impact and idiosyncrasy of other detectives of the era such as Ellery Queen, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Lord Peter Wimsey, Maigret, or Simon Templar (“The Saint”). Even with the later addition of an amateur psychologist in the form of Sergeant Hemingway, Georgette’s detectives never attained icon status. Death in the Stocks earned her another commendation from Dorothy L. Sayers, however: “Miss Heyer’s characters and dialogue are an abiding delight to me…I have seldom met people to whom I took so violent a fancy from the word ‘Go.’”

  Georgette always noted her reviews. Though when Moore’s assistant, Norah Perriam, wrote to make sure she had seen and kept them, she laughingly dismissed the idea: “But my dear good creature, do you really picture me with a pot of paste and a pair of scissors eagerly sticking press cuttings into an album? I’m thirty-three & I’ve been writing for thirteen years—no, sixteen years!7 The day of such follies is over fast.” This did not prevent Georgette from telling Norah Perriam exactly which papers had reviewed her novel and where the best reviews had appeared! Although she often denied taking an interest in such things, she was always aware of where she was written up and by whom and her attitude to her publisher could shift according to the kind of press coverage she received for each new novel.

  Longmans did not want to lose Georgette after the success of Death in the Stocks but in February 1935 she severed relations with the firm and signed her first contract with Hodder & Stoughton for “her next four new and original ‘modern’ novels.” Determined to maintain two separate publishers for her historical and contemporary books, she had great hopes of Hodder. Their list included some of the most successful writers of the day and the firm had built a strong reputation among readers with their trademark Yellow Jacket books. John Buchan, Baroness Orczy, “Sapper,” James Hilton, and Leslie Charteris were all well-known Hodder authors when Georgette joined the firm. It was not only the firm’s stellar list which impressed her, however, but also their ability to sell novels. By the mid-thirties, the firm proudly claimed “There was not a bookshop that did not open its doors to a traveler [company salesman] with the Yellow Jacket list to sell.”

  Established in 1868, Hodder & Stoughton had a long-standing reputation for conservative values and reliability. For many years the firm had been run by Sir Ernest Hodder-Williams and his younger brothers, Percy and Ralph, all of whom were members of a Nonconformist family whose strong Christian beliefs permeated every part of their business. When Ernest died in 1927 Percy became head of the company. It was perhaps fortunate that Georgette had very little direct contact with her new publisher for she and Percy Hodder-Williams were far from being kindred spirits. He was well-known among literary agents as “the last of the puritans” and, while she was herself undeniably conservative in many of her v
iews, Georgette would not have approved of the type of moral censorship which Hodder sometimes applied to its authors’ manuscripts. In 1924, Ernest had turned down Michael Arlen’s bestselling novel, The Green Hat, on the grounds that its content did not comply with Hodder’s policy that their Yellow Jacket books had “nothing in them which would shock or harm any reader from ten to eighty.” Ten years later, Percy had similarly refused to publish a Leslie Charteris “Saint” story called “The Intemperate Reformer” because “it was too much of an affront to the nonconformist conscience.” While Georgette was aware of Hodder’s conservative editorial policy there was nothing to indicate that it would ever affect her and she signed the new contract without a qualm.

  Within a week of finalizing the Hodder deal, Georgette had also signed a contract with Heinemann for her new historical romance. For the first time since joining the firm in 1925 her contract included an option on her next three historical novels. Provided she could maintain the pace of writing which she had sustained over the past decade, between them the Heinemann and the Hodder contracts meant that she had guaranteed publication for her next seven novels. It must have been a huge boost to her morale. All she had to do was write them.

  Three months later Georgette had a breakdown. Early in May she became ill with what she described as “internal poisoning,” which though not desperate was horrid. The condition quickly became serious, however, and she told her old friend John Hayward that she had “succumbed to a Nervous Breakdown and been languishing ever since.” For several weeks she remained confined to her bed, unable to work, and with instructions from the doctor not to write anything until she had recovered. It was three years since Richard’s birth and in that time Georgette had moved house twice, written six books, endured periods without domestic support, suffered several episodes of severe financial strain, and committed herself to writing seven new novels. In some ways a breakdown does not seem surprising.

  “It’s only fair to warn you that I have had some sort of a collapse,” she wrote to Norah Perriam in late May, “& am under strict doctors orders still. I’m getting better, but I doubt whether I could do any work. I find I can’t even read for long without losing all power of concentration. The only thing to do is to obey orders, & hope for the best. I’m up—which means that I get up to lunch, lie on a sofa till eight o’clock, & crawl back to bed.” Ronald was to take her away for a full month’s convalescence at the end of June, and, despite her weakened state, she had urgently requested that the proofs of her new historical romance be sent to her before they left for the north. These had promptly arrived—awash with errors. In spite of repeated requests that her books be typeset exactly as written, to her great chagrin Georgette found that Heinemann’s printer had “corrected” her spelling, punctuation, and capitalization.

  She had decided views about how her books should read and her irritation with Heinemann was only exacerbated by their habit of sending her a bill for excess corrections of the proofs. She laboriously amended the printer’s “corrections” of her work and then wrote a detailed account of her concerns which she asked her agent to “convey tactfully” to Heinemann:

  They are not “bad” proofs; by which I mean that there are very few printer’s slips. What is bad is that the compositor had throughout followed his own inclination where it has seemed good to him. Now, I think that after all this time I am not being unreasonable when I say that I expect Heinemann’s printers to remember & to respect my personal idiosyncrasies. For years I have spelled words such as Realize with a z…In every book of mine Heinemann have had of late years they have changed all my z’s to s’s, & I have been obliged to change them back…In every instance I have mentioned an inn, they have put the name between inverts, Thus we have:- The chaise drew up at “The Green Man”—till I could scream…

  The proofs were for Regency Buck—her first novel set in the colorful, extravagant decade known as the English Regency (1811–1820), when George III was “mad” and his eldest son, George, was appointed Prince Regent to rule in his stead. Georgette’s reading and research for her eighteenth-century novels had led her to the Regency era, a rich repository of fascinating people, places, and events. She “raided” the London Library for books and spent hours among the sources soaking up information about life in the period. A year earlier she had written enthusiastically to Moore about her plans for the novel: “I’m going to open Regency Buck with a Prize Fight—probably Cribb’s second battle with Molyneux, at Thistleton Gap. I’ve read Annals of the Ring & Pugilistica—& I know a bit about it now, I can tell you. There will also be a bit of cocking, possibly a meeting of the Beefsteaks, certainly a coaching race to Brighton & a street mill. It ought to be a lovely book.”

  It was “a lovely book” in some ways, although it did not achieve the subtlety of plot or the brilliance of character which were to be the hallmarks of her later Regency novels. It is an entertaining story which offers a vivid introduction to upper-class Regency London and Brighton in 1811 and 1812. The book is not without its faults, however. Georgette’s enthusiasm for the new period spilled over into the novel in a rare example of over-writing and there are moments when the ephemeral detail threatens to engulf the plot.

  Carried away by so much rich material Georgette also made an uncharacteristic error. Toward the end of the book she sent her heroine, Judith Taverner, to Brighton—there to meet the Prince Regent at his summer palace, the Brighton Pavilion. In describing (in loving detail) the minaret-domed exterior and the magnificent Chinoiserie interior of the Pavilion, Georgette described a building which did not yet exist in that form. Judith’s visit to Brighton took place in 1812. Yet the Oriental architecture and opulent interior which were to become such an iconic testament to the Regent’s extravagance did not commence until 1815 and were not completed until 1823.

  While it remains the fiction writer’s prerogative to adapt history to suit the needs of a story, this had never been Georgette’s approach. Her mistake in Regency Buck came from her reading of the limited source material (there were only four books about the Pavilion published before 1935)—in this case a careless reading of Brayley’s 1838 Account of the Pavilion. Georgette made very few mistakes in her historical novels and the discovery of an error always caused her considerable distress. Some months later, while on a visit to Grantham, she was dismayed to find “that the George Inn here, which I described in the Buck as Palladian, is no such thing. I have mixed it up with another.” She made no mention of her more major error, however, and like most of her readers it appears that Georgette never realized her mistake.

  Whatever its faults, after correcting the proofs Georgette was pleased enough with the final manuscript to make a rare positive pronouncement about one of her novels. “Have just been glancing through Regency Buck,” she told Moore, “& really it is rather a fascinating book!! I actually became lost in my own work! I do hope it sells. It’s easily my best.” She also expressed something of her innermost feelings about her writing: “If Regency Buck doesn’t go big I will die—because I shall have lost my faith in human nature, my belief in myself, & all my secret hopes.”

  One of her unspoken secret hopes was her growing desire for greater recognition. While the new Heinemann contract with its £500 advance (a significant increase on the £350 paid for The Convenient Marriage) had made her feel appreciated, Georgette also wanted to know that what she wrote was good. Although she always maintained a sense of humor about her writing in the 1930s, it had not yet acquired the rather cynical, self-deprecating tone that would emerge in the next decade. While she had a capacity for self-mockery, in the Sussex years it was of a gentler, kinder type which she occasionally expressed to Moore:

  When you write your memoirs I shall expect to figure largely in them. In fact, I think I’ll insert all the bits about Me myself. I feel you might not do justice to the Grandeur of the Subject. I don’t want to read that “Georgette Heyer was one of my more frequent visitors. I can see her now, seated in my office for
long hours at a stretch, talking about her baby & Bigger Royalties.” Yes, you may well blush. Well, you’re not going to publish that bit. The bit you’re going to insert will run on these lines: “Then there was Georgette Heyer, strange, incalculable creature, whose letters to me are among my most treasured possessions. Every one is a Prose Poem, even the one’s [sic] about her publisher, & the exquisite refinement of her language, & the modesty of her sentiments baffle description.”

  Even when writing to Norah Perriam from her sickbed, Georgette managed to find humor in the situation: “I toy with the idea of an expensive funeral & a book (by my spouse) entitled Georgette Heyer As I Knew Her. And of course my letters, all collected & published with notes supplied by a sorrowing editor. But if I’ve got an American publisher, perhaps I’ll postpone it all.”

  She had not had an American publisher since the 1920s when Houghton Mifflin and Small Maynard had between them published five of her early books. Although Longmans had also published a handful of her titles in the United States in the 1920s (her four contemporary novels, and two Heinemann titles: The Masqueraders and Beauvallet), it was nearly ten years since Moore had sold one of her books directly to an American firm. In 1935, Doubleday Doran bought Death in the Stocks and published it under the title Merely Murder. Despite her early success in America with her historical fiction, Doubleday turned down Regency Buck. In Britain, however, Georgette’s historical novels were growing in popularity. In that year alone Heinemann had reprinted These Old Shades three times (13,000 copies), The Masqueraders (8,000), Beauvallet (9,000), and Devil’s Cub had sold an impressive 15,000 copies.

  Georgette was disappointed about the American response to Regency Buck but certain they would