Georgette Heyer

by Jennifer Kloester

  I expect to finish the new book within the next ten days, & will bring it in as soon as the last word is typed, & trust to you to wring the advance out of H. & S. in record time. I will then start to work for the Heinemann book, but I am troubled by the few months at my disposal, & wonder whether I must yet once more shelve Charlotte, & do something easy. And yet that’s such bad policy—oh dear, how difficult life is! And all the time there’s a book in my head that would be terrific—& would take me a year to do. I do wish my useless mother-in-law would die. Things would be so simple then! Wouldn’t Frere, & the public, & every one else just gulp down an Elizabethan book—not high life, but Alsalia,10 [sic] Abraham-man, mariners & that fascinating London life of the period? Oh, L.P. I’ve had it in my head for years, & never found the time to study for it yet! It’s a grand story, too, & in the richest of backgrounds—not food for babes & sucklings, but I think really big—very long, of course.

  Georgette wanted literary kudos. If she could not write Princess Charlotte’s biography she thought perhaps a grand Elizabethan novel set in Alsatia (the area of London where criminals could legally claim sanctuary until 1697) would impress the critics. Her ambition had veered toward the serious novel—though she would never allow herself the freedom from either financial or family cares to pursue it properly.

  Her unfeeling remark about Ronald’s mother was indicative of the stress she was under as well as the strain she sometimes felt caring for her extended family. Nor did it help that she still had not managed to release her mother-in-law’s securities. She had reduced the overdraft but not enough and she felt the weight of the debt very much. A few years earlier Jean Rougier had moved to Sussex to be nearer her son and daughter-in-law and the closer proximity had not enhanced relations between her and Georgette. Age had not diluted the acidity of Jean Rougier’s tongue and as she grew older she needed increasing amounts of care and attention. A good deal of this responsibility fell to Georgette and there were times when she resented it—particularly when it interrupted her writing.

  Alleviating the financial pressure meant producing books in fairly quick succession. To write the serious novels she envisioned meant a long delay between advances and this she could not afford. Georgette’s talent had become both a source of pleasure and a burden and sometimes she found herself wishing that: “I were a Victorian Little Woman, & not a wage-earner. It is a vicious circle, you know, if I were to devote a month to the writing of shorts, I should be late with the Heinemann book, & that would be fatal. Oh well! I suppose one day I shall look back & smile at these agonies.” But her financial woes were set to continue for some time.

  Her concerns about money prompted her to query again Hodder’s handling of the cheap editions of her detective fiction. Since the advent of the six-pence Penguin paperbacks in 1935 and the success of Gollancz’s two-shillings-and-six-pence hardback editions, with their eye-catching yellow wrappers, competition in the cheap edition market had become fierce. Yet, despite her objections, Hodder insisted on selling their cheap editions at the uncompetitive price of four shillings. Georgette urged Hodder at least to match the Gollancz price of two shillings and six pence, but they refused. Their slowness to act shook her confidence in the firm and she told Moore that she would “retire from public life before I let H. & S. get their talons on my real work.”

  Her real work was her historical fiction and she returned to it in mid-March. She had been lent Sir George Scovell’s (1774–1861) unpublished diaries and his account of his experiences in the Napoleonic Wars reignited an old ambition. She had first thought of writing a book about “Smith” in 1922 and now she began gathering material for a story about Harry Smith, the famous soldier of the 95th Rifle Brigade who became governor of the Cape Colony (the South African towns of Harrismith and Ladysmith were named after Harry and his wife). This time there would be no need for a fictional romance, for Harry had met and married his aristocratic young Spanish bride, Juana, on the battlefield after the fall of Badajos. Once again, Georgette immersed herself in the contemporary sources and set about weaving the Smiths’ adventures into the daily drama of battlefield life. She drew heavily on Sir Charles Oman’s “monumental” History of the Peninsular War and would later thank Carola’s father for his “kindness in searching for an obscure reference on my behalf.”

  Georgette had written twenty-five thousand words of the new novel in just three months when family demands again interrupted her work. Richard was unwell and her mother-in-law was becoming increasingly incapable, with a form of dementia then called cerebral anemia. Mrs. Rougier needed regular attention, and Georgette admitted “I shan’t be able to do much this month, what with mother-in-law, & then Richard’s operation.” The local shops were demanding payment and she urged Moore to “wring the royalties out of all publishers” as the latest check would “settle a few outstanding accounts, but only a few.” In May Ronald had been formally admitted to the Bar and was beginning to get briefs, but it was a slow business and it would be some time before Georgette would feel that the burden of financial responsibility was no longer hers alone. She was a little cheered by her first appearance in Who’s Who in 1939, but these were difficult times both on the home front and abroad, and Georgette could not help thinking that her new book was “the only bright spot in an otherwise god-forsaken existence.”

  The situation on the Continent had worsened through 1939 as Hitler had pushed further into Eastern Europe. In March Chamberlain had pledged Britain’s defense of Poland in the event of a German invasion. Georgette did her best to ignore the gathering storm clouds and get on with her writing. In mid-August she sent the first few chapters of The Spanish Bride to Moore with a detailed outline of the book. She was pleased with her progress and thought “the story would serialize very well. It will be all incident, & love-stuff.” She hoped Dorothy Sutherland would buy it. She had also been asked to write a modern serial for a new magazine and, needing the cash, had agreed to do it under a pseudonym. She had thought of “the nucleus of a nice story for the serial, but haven’t worked it out yet. Sort of paraphrase of Regency Buck, in modern dress, & much shorter.” But she could not write it until she had finished The Spanish Bride.

  Faced with what she saw as a dire financial situation, Georgette sought advice from Moore:

  The bank is getting very restive, as the overdraft is over £1000. I’ve explained to them about not being able to finish my book, & thus pay in £750, but meanwhile I must reduce the thing to reasonable proportions, & have said that I’ll do so. I want £500. £300 to bring the overdraft within limits of my securities—at least, my mother’s [in-law] securities; £170 to pay 2nd installment of Income Tax, overdue; & £119 to pay an outstanding account…It seems to me that if we are to anticipate royalties I must cover that, or find myself in a worse mess next year. If you could sell the Bride as a serial for £300–£350, & get me £300 for the pseudonym work, I should have done it—but how chancy! I honestly don’t know which way to turn, & it’s fast getting me down. My head begins to swim, always a bad sign. It would be awful if I went in for another of my nervous breakdowns. I try not to let myself think too much, but it’s difficult when letters come from the bank, demanding instant attention.

  To add to her woes, her domestic arrangements were in disarray and she was having to cope with “no servants, except one daily help, very rough—I spend my time cooking.” Ronald was working in London most days and Richard’s imminent operation meant at least three weeks of convalescence at home when he would need her attention. With the advance for The Spanish Bride looking increasingly unlikely before the new year, Georgette struggled to think of some other way to bring in some money. Heinemann had recently sent Royal Escape to Alexander Korda, the film director, and she had a brief hope that Korda would buy it. But it was not to be, and Georgette was left to ask Moore: “Will you let me know what you propose doing? I’m dreadfully sorry to be such a nuisance to you, & there’s no sort of reason why you should be bothered with my idiotic
affairs. It is nice of you to help me.”

  A fortnight later, her personal anxieties faded before a much greater concern. On 1 September 1939 Germany invaded Poland. Two days later the British Prime Minister announced that the deadline for Germany’s withdrawal had passed and that “consequently, this nation is at war.” In Britain people expected an immediate start to the fighting and gas masks were issued, bomb shelters built, defenses laid, and city children evacuated to the countryside before the combatants settled into what became known as the “Phoney War.” For months little happened as both sides attempted to negotiate an end to the war. Some people were lulled into believing that the crisis had passed, but Georgette remained skeptical.

  The declaration of war was the worst in a series of events that left her feeling low. “I’m too tired & dispirited to think of another [story],” she told Moore. “I suppose I shall have to try & finish the book, & must start night-work again. It won’t be ready for anything earlier than January publication, if that. I wish some German would come & drop a bomb on me. It would solve all my problems.” Her money troubles seemed set to continue and when Dorothy Sutherland turned down The Spanish Bride on the grounds that it was too heavy for her readers Georgette was not surprised. Richard’s operation had meant putting the novel to one side anyway and the only writing she had done during his convalescence was a lighthearted Regency short story entitled “Pursuit” for The Queen’s Book of the Red Cross. Georgette was one of fifty “distinguished authors and artists” asked to donate their services to Queen Elizabeth’s (later the Queen Mother) special fund-raising anthology.

  Georgette picked up the threads of The Spanish Bride again in November, however, and at a lunch at the Heinemann headquarters at Kingswood was able to report good progress. Kingswood was the home of Heinemann’s Windmill Press. Opened in January 1928 it was located in rural Surrey just outside Greater London and had a printing press, bindery, warehouse, offices, and a staff of 150. Heinemann had evacuated to Kingswood after war was declared, leaving just a skeleton staff at its London office. Georgette did not often go to Kingswood but she enjoyed her day there that autumn: “We got along very well, though it was tacitly accepted that Frere has the handling of my work. But the party—Evans, Frere, Oliver, Hall,11 & myself, was most cheery, & everyone was flatteringly full of interest in the Smiths.” Gratified by their response to The Spanish Bride she returned to Sussex delighted to know her novel was being taken seriously.

  The Kingswood lunch further consolidated her friendship with Frere. Afterwards he gave her a copy of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s recently translated account of his experiences as an aviator in the 1920s. Two days later Georgette wrote to Frere directly to “thank him” for Wind, Sand and Stars:

  Damn you for giving me a book like that on the very day that you urge me to finish my own by Christmas. To start with, one can’t put it down, & to go on with it puts one out of conceit with oneself, & convinces one that one’s (the deadly snare of “one” I observe!) own book ought to be thrown into the dustbin. But it’s quite lovely, isn’t it? The most elusive, fragile piece of work. Both R. & I are entranced by it. Oh dear! It’s a real book, & what in hell are the rest of us playing about at? What’s it like in the original? What a power of phrase the man has!…Talk of purple patches! Why, Frere, you can open it anywhere & find a passage that leaps to your eye! Well, I’m quite disgruntled, & I can’t think why I ever embraced the profession of scrivener. Was it really as effortless as it seems? No, I think not. Surely only rigid pruning could have achieved that perfection. You will say, there speaks the journeyman writer.

  She was unsure about pruning her own Spanish Bride, which at 160,000 words was to be one of her long novels. Although Georgette got “the horrors from time to time, & am cross with one or two chapters,” she thought it “definitely Nice Work.” She enjoyed breathing life into dry historical documents and teasing out the human qualities in iconic historical figures: Wellington was already “making a nuisance of himself, & trying to steal the stage.” Thinking he might be concerned about the book’s length, Georgette reassured Frere that:

  The worst book I ever wrote—the sort of book that makes you wake up shuddering in the night was 160,000, & you ought to know that it still sells hotly. I wish to god it wouldn’t. Do you think that one day we could consign everything to the literary dustheap that I wrote before The Masqueraders, & change all the awful inversions in that one? My god, I had occasion to look something up the other day, & I’m damned if it isn’t a Come-April [sic] book.12 Oh, I’ll let you keep on with those damned Old Shades, just because I need the characters again. [Going by the word count and considering only those books written before The Masqueraders, the “worst book” she ever wrote appears to have been The Great Roxhythe.]

  She also promised him that: “If (bribe coming) you can send me any information about Richard B. Frere, gazetted 1st lieut 21 Aug. 1810, in 1/95, I’ll not only feature him, but I’ll dedicate the book to his illustrious descendant!” She finished the manuscript a week before Christmas, kept her promise, and dedicated it “To A.S. Frere.” She was sorry to see the end of the novel, for she had found real satisfaction in writing it. Between them, An Infamous Army and The Spanish Bride had kept alive her dream of one day writing a grand historical novel. But the world was at war and events had been set in train which would shift the direction of her writing and change many things forever.

  10 Georgette meant Alsatia.

  11 B.F. Oliver and H.L. Hall were Heinemann directors.

  12 The phrase “Come-April“ probably relates to the old English nursery rhyme: “The cuckoo comes in April.” The cuckoo being a reference to the “old Gentleman” of the novel.

  18

  I now have a very definite & over-mastering desire to throw off a Regency trifle,—a bubble of a novel: romantic, improbable, &—we hope—a little sparkling.

  —Georgette Heyer

  The new year brought fresh challenges. Georgette’s plan to write the new Hodder thriller and the pseudonymous magazine serial had not come off. She felt uninspired and by February still had not begun either the thriller or the serial. Ronald did his best to help her through her difficulties. Aware that financial pressure had prompted her to accept the magazine proposal he tried to offer a more considered view, advising against the pseudonym story, which he felt would not do justice to her talents, and urging her to concentrate on the Hodder book instead. Georgette gave up the pseudonym serial reluctantly for she had wanted the money badly. Instead, she decided that as soon as the Hodder book was done she would concentrate on “turning out a feuilleton [serial], or some shorts, or start work on Henry V, or pass out.”

  The idea for a book about Henry V had been in her mind for some time. She was a great admirer of Shakespeare’s historical drama, King Henry V, with its themes of patriotism and English bravery and its memorable speeches: “Once more unto the breach” and “We band of brothers.” The play had always been popular in times of national crisis. In the current clime Georgette felt that a novel (to be called Stark Harry) about the English victory at Agincourt would be well-received. Her agent was less convinced and she felt compelled to reassure him: “My dear L.P.! I do hope you will rid your mind of the idea that Henry V will be as faulty a work as The Conqueror! I never was more depressed than when I read your grim prophecy. And if it isn’t a damned sight better than the Army (which has always filled me with a sense of satisfaction) it is time I packed up.”

  Money troubles meant that the detective novel took precedence over Stark Harry, however, and life became increasingly fraught as Georgette tried to start the new novel and deal with increasing debt, renewed health problems, and the inevitable consequences of war. Although rumors of a German invasion had so far come to nothing and Hitler had not yet launched his attack on the west, it was expected that hostilities would soon begin in earnest. Boris had already enlisted, Frank was intending to join up, and Ronald had begun considering ways and means of getting past the ey
esight problems which had kept him out of the Great War.

  Although Georgette would not have attempted to dissuade her menfolk from fighting, their decisions to do so only added to a strain already exacerbated by a lack of domestic help and a general feeling of malaise. “I can’t remember when I’ve felt so utterly finished,” she told Moore. She felt ill and tired, with no resistance: “If any one sneezes near me I at once develop a cold; the slightest draught gives me neuralgia; & a stupid companion makes me so irritable that I can scarcely contain myself.”

  Dealing with the proofs of The Spanish Bride was also demanding: “After reading it nine times I can scarcely like it, but there is one point about which I was doubtful: the timing is good. Nor is it, as I feared, just one dam’ battle after another…Frere says he knows it is a good book—but I suspect him of trying to cheer a lady whom he knows to be practically moribund.” The only bright spot on the domestic horizon was the possibility of a cook. It would be a great relief to have that particular burden lifted from her, although Georgette was proud of her efforts to keep things going at home during such a difficult time: “Considering the state of my blood-pressure, it hasn’t been bad going, has it? I’ve done all the cooking, looked after my young, & written a hugely long & intricate book.” Increased rationing had not helped. Petrol, butter, sugar, bacon, and meat were already rationed with tea, margarine, cooking fats, cheese, and fruit to follow. But even more disturbing from Georgette’s point of view was the announcement of paper rationing.

  With publishers’ paper allocations set at just sixty percent of their consumption in the twelve months before the War, paper rationing was a grave concern for the industry. Once rationing began it was the unenviable job of Heinemann’s management to work out which books to publish and which not. As John St. John explained in A Century of Publishing: