Georgette Heyer

by Jennifer Kloester

  Induce your publisher to hand over at once a sum of money grossly in excess of what the book is likely to be worth to him. This gives one a certain amount of incentive to write the thing, and may be achieved by various methods, the most highly recommended being what may be termed as The Little Woman Act.

  Think out a snappy title. This deceives the publisher into thinking (a) that he is getting the Book of the Year; and (b) that you have the whole plot already mapped out. The only drawback lies in the fact that having announced a title you will be slightly handicapped when it comes to hanging some kind of story on to it.

  Brood for several weeks, achieving, if not a Plot, depression, despair, and hysteria in yourself, and a strong desire to leave home in your entourage. This condition will induce you to believe yourself to be the victim of Artistic Temperament, and may even mislead you into thinking that you really are a Creative Artist.

  While under this delusion, jab a sheet of paper into your typewriter, and hurl on to it Chapter I. This may give you an idea, not perhaps for the whole book, but for Chapter II.

  Introduce several characters who might conceivably be useful later on. You never know: they may take matters into their own hands.

  Assuming that he has been properly trained, read over what you have done to your husband. His extravagant enthusiasm may lead you to think you’ve perpetrated something good and this will inspire you to churn out a bit more.

  Think out a grand final scene, with the maximum number of incongruous characters massed together in some improbable place. Allow your sense of farce full play. This will, with any luck at all, make the reader forget what the rest of the book was like.

  Try and work out how and why these characters got together remembering that it is better to “gloss over,” by technique (which if you haven’t learned in thirty years you ought to have learned), than to put your head in the gas oven.

  Book a room in a good Mental Home.

  Finally, a few things to be avoided while engaged on this work:

  The thought that you are enduring this agony only to enrich the Inland Revenue.

  All thought of the book that has obsessed your mind and soul for the past six months.

  Any rational thought whatsoever. To indulge in this can only mean that you will stop dead, realizing that you are writing unmitigated rubbish, and would have done better as a charwoman.

  I might, with propriety, append a few Phrases for Husbands—Copyright by Mr. G.R. Rougier.

  Your hand has not lost its cunning.

  Strange that you should write anything so lively when you are not in the mood.

  What “happened,” pray, in FRIDAY’S CHILD?

  I shouldn’t worry.

  I am sure Frere will love it.

  I think it is most amusing, and/or most interesting.

  Haven’t you got anything more to read to me?

  You always feel like this when you write a winner.

  Just carry on.

  It will come to you in a flash. (Cite examples from the past.)

  Three weeks later, despite “laboring under all the disabilities of Sinus Trouble,” Georgette finished Sophy and wryly declared that it did “not perhaps stink as much as at one time I feared it might.”

  26

  I must confess that I resent having my novels used, jig-saw fashion, to provide others with material for their stories. I can bear with tolerable equanimity the indignation of my readers at what—to quote the latest letter I have received—they call “gross plagiarism,” but not the accusation, several times endured, of publishing shoddy stuff, under a pseudonym.

  —Georgette Heyer

  Georgette’s regular self-deprecation was to some extent a defense mechanism. Well able to recognize that her books sat outside the canon of great literature, she could also see that what she wrote was a good deal better than many of the novels on offer to an increasingly literate audience. She rarely spoke about her research or her writing and, on the few occasions when she did mention such things in her letters, the references were usually brief and sardonic. It was not until she learned that her burgeoning popularity had encouraged one imitator to overstep the boundary between inspiration and appropriation that Georgette finally mounted an energetic defense of her work.

  She was first made aware of the possibility of plagiarism in May 1950, when a fan wrote to inform her of an author who had been “immersing herself in some of your books and making good use of them.” She was referring to Barbara Cartland who had recently published her first three historical novels.22 A Hazard of Hearts and A Duel of Hearts (1949) were the first and second books in a “Georgian” trilogy of which the third novel, Knave of Hearts, had just been published. Barbara Cartland was a socialite with connections to the “best circles,” an occasional columnist for the Daily Express and the author of several works of nonfiction, three plays, and some thirty moderately successful modern romances. She had written A Hazard of Hearts after a woman’s magazine had commissioned her to write her first historical romance.

  Georgette had never heard of Barbara Cartland and an initial, cursory reading of Cartland’s first two historical novels left her inclined to dismiss the author as no more than “a petty thief ” of names, characters, and plot points. Among Cartland’s more obvious “borrowings” were several names from Friday’s Child, including Sir Montagu Revesby, altered to “Sir Montagu Reversby;” Hero Wantage, now “Harriet Wantage;” Viscount Sheringham was “Viscount Sherringham,” while Lord Wrotham remained “Lord Wrotham.” Georgette identified many additional “lifts” from this and others of her novels, including The Corinthian, The Reluctant Widow, and The Foundling:

  On perusing the first two novels of Miss Cartland’s trilogy, I was astonished to find that my informant had underestimated the case in so far as the number of identical, or infinitesimally altered names and titles is concerned. I also found what might best be described as paraphrases of situations I had created, and a suspicious number of Regency cant words, or obsolete turns of speech, all of which I can pin-point in several of my books, and all of which I have acquired during fourteen years’ study of the period. The facts that no word or phrase I have not yet used appears in Miss Cartland’s works, and that she shows a strange ignorance of the meaning of some of those she does use also seem to me to be significant.

  Having cited several of Cartland’s errors, Georgette concluded with what she considered a clincher: “One slang phrase which appears in her book, Hazard of Hearts, I got from an unpublished source.” This, she explained, was “a privately printed book, lent me by a descendant of Lieut. Gawler, because the owner had enjoyed An Infamous Army. I don’t think I have met the expression elsewhere, and I am sure Miss Cartland has had no access to my sources.”

  Aware that there “was no copyright in names” or in Regency parlance, Georgette’s initial thought was to write a strong letter of protest to Barbara Cartland. But on reading Knave of Hearts, she changed her mind and wrote to her solicitor instead:

  Miss Cartland—possibly emboldened by my having taken no notice of her previous lifts—has now gone very much further. The conception of THE KNAVE OF HEARTS, the principal characters, and many of the incidents, derive directly from an early book of my own, entitled THESE OLD SHADES, and first published by Messrs William Heinemann in 1926.

  A complete reading left Georgette in no doubt that in writing Knave of Hearts the author had lifted far more than characters and incidents: “For her main theme Miss Cartland has gone solely to THESE OLD SHADES, but for various minor situations and other characters she has drawn upon four of my other novels.”

  She carefully worked her way through Cartland’s third historical novel and her own relevant books, annotating as she went. When she next wrote to her solicitor Georgette not only sent a cross-indexed copy of The Knave of Hearts in which she had “ringed all names and period phrases, in red ink, and indicated in black ink, giving title of my own book and page of passage, all situations identical or too like
mine, and all paraphrases,” but also a ten-page list of the main points of similarity between the novels, with examples of Cartland’s historical and linguistic errors. It was not only Regency dialogue which her imitator appeared not to understand but also Regency fashion, as Georgette pointed out:

  From Hazard of Hearts, pp.68, 69. “He was in riding clothes, with boots of Hessian leather fitting perfectly over tight breeches of the latest shade of yellow, his coat of a rich shade of brown had been cut by the great Stultz himself.” From Friday’s Child, p.4. “The long-tailed coat of blue cloth, made for him by no less a personage than the great Stultz, sat without a crease across his shoulders; his breeches were of the fashionable pale yellow; and his top-boots were exquisitely polished.” Strange that Miss Cartland, so well-informed on such details as the most fashionable color for breeches, and one of the most fashionable tailors of the day, should fall down on the ABC of Regency dress. Hessians were worn with pantaloons, never with breeches.

  But even worse to Georgette’s mind was Barbara Cartland’s “travesty” of the characters which “she had done her best to model on mine” and “a certain salacity which I find revolting, no sense of period, not a vestige of wit, and no ability to make a character ‘live,’” besides a decided “melodramatic bias.” The “whole thing makes me feel more than a little unwell,” she told Moore. “I think I could have borne it better had Miss Cartland not been so common-minded, so salacious and so illiterate. I think ill enough of the Shades, but, good God!, that nineteen-year old work has more style, more of what it takes, than this offal which she has written at the age of 46!”

  Her detailed appraisal of Barbara Cartland’s writing and research was the first time Georgette had comprehensively acknowledged her own very real pride in her research, her grasp of the era, her erudition, and her ability to make characters and period “come alive”—something which, in her estimation, Miss Cartland had totally failed to do. She was appalled by the author’s palpable ignorance of the period and her apparent lack of historical integrity. In Georgette’s view, writing historical fiction did not lessen an author’s responsibility to the reader to provide an accurate and convincing account of her chosen slice of a particular period:

  With regard to the idioms, cant terms, and certain descriptions of costume, a novelist who showed throughout her books the erudition that one might have supposed to be necessary for the employment of these, could successfully claim to have culled them, as I did myself, from original sources. But no novelist who had found, through research, the rather recondite bits of period color (so to speak) could possibly have fallen into the gross errors that bespatter Miss Cartland’s pages. She is not only slightly illiterate: she displays an almost abysmal ignorance of her period. Cheek by jowl with some piece of what I should call special knowledge (all of which I can point out in my books) one finds an anachronism so blatant as to show clearly that Miss Cartland knows rather less about the period than the average schoolgirl, and has certainly never read enough contemporary literature to put her in possession of the sudden bit of erudition that every now and then staggers the informed reader. I am firmly of the opinion that if she were asked to state the source of any one of the archaisms, or recondite details, which she inserts into her books she would be unable to do so—since it is unlikely that she would cite me as her authority.

  Georgette could see “no reason why I should permit her to cash in on either my ideas, or my research” and told her agent bitterly that: “I would rather by far that a common thief broke in and stole all the silver.” She resented the time needed to read Barbara Cartland’s novels and the distraction from her own medieval book. She thought that the case might come to court but what she really wanted was for Knave of Hearts “to be withdrawn from circulation, the offending names in her previous works altered, and a profound apology made to me.” There is no record of a response to her solicitor’s letter to Barbara Cartland but Georgette later noted that “the horrible copies of my books ceased abruptly.”

  22 Plagiarism can be a notoriously complex issue and is often difficult to prove. It must be pointed out that no official judgment has ever been made in relation to these books. To anyone familiar with Georgette Heyer’s historical novels, however, Barbara Cartland’s Knave of Hearts does strike a great many chords in terms of plot, characters, setting, and dialogue. Georgette never brought the case to court, though she did brief her solicitor, who sent a formal letter of protest to Miss Cartland’s publisher. Georgette’s main aim was to put a stop to the “borrowings” and, if possible, to see the books withdrawn from sale. In 1971, Knave of Hearts was reissued under a new title, The Innocent Heiress, with a heading: “In the Tradition of Georgette Heyer.”

  27

  Frere says I have no business sense.

  —Georgette Heyer

  In September The Grand Sophy appeared and Georgette had another instant bestseller. At Heinemann the book had been forecast as a “runaway” and the finance director, H.L. Hall, described it as “the best Heyer for a long time” and “a Heyer to really stand up to the Heyer reputation.” Sophy was also a hit in Australia, where it sold forty thousand copies in its first five months. Although it did less well in America, where Georgette felt that Putnam’s made a poor job of selling her, The Grand Sophy received several enthusiastic reviews in the States, including one from the Chicago Sunday Tribune which read in part:

  Once again Georgette Heyer has demonstrated her amazing ability to make English life in the late 18th century [sic] as real as today’s news, flavoring it well with that spirit of that earlier day, and making the whole a piece of delectable entertainment. If this is not the highest art, it is certainly a relief for the reader, jaded with novels that try to deal significantly with sordid elements of life in our times, whether their approach be sound or sensational…There is more to this than superb entertainment, for Miss Heyer’s art is a facile and limber one. It is no small feat to make Regency London come to life, and to make its characters speak and act as did the people of that time and place, without too much quaintness or strangeness of manner.

  Although Georgette was pleased by the book’s success, her reaction to the news that Sophy was “selling between 400 and 800 copies a day” in Britain was to tell Frere that “This spells RUIN” and to ask Louisa Callender acidly how she was to pay the tax on it. With the highest tax rate at the time set at nearly eighty-five percent the demands of the surtax were oppressive and Georgette had begun writing her first detective story in ten years in order to raise additional funds to pay it.

  The new novel featured the return of her erstwhile detective, Hemingway. One of Ronald’s colleagues, Tony Hawke, had asked for the book and suggested that (given his years in the force) Inspector Hemingway should be made a Chief Inspector. Georgette had complied. The book was called Duplicate Death and Tony Hawke was one of “certain members of the Bench and Bar” to whom it was dedicated. Its hero was Timothy Harte—the irrepressible fourteen-year-old in They Found Him Dead and now a handsome young barrister unwittingly embroiled in a murder mystery. Like her own son, the young men in Georgette’s novels were growing up.

  Richard had now left Marlborough, where he had done well, and in 1951 was awarded an exhibition to Pembroke College, Cambridge. He delayed going up to university, however, in order to complete his eighteen months compulsory National Service. Richard joined the 2nd battalion of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, a choice of regiment which gave his mother particular pleasure, for the Rifle Corps had its origins in the 95th Regiment of Foot—the regiment in which Harry Smith of The Spanish Bride had served.

  But Georgette’s pleasure in Richard’s achievements was tempered by the discovery that Heinemann had scheduled reprints of Simon the Coldheart, The Black Moth, and The Great Roxhythe in its Uniform edition. She liked the new series which had “figured handsomely on the latest royalty statement,” but did not want her early books reprinted. “PLEASE, PERLEASE don’t do this!” she begged Frere.

  I
thought we were agreed that, with the exception of the SHADES, over which I have no control, everything prior to the MASQUERADERS should be allowed to sink into decent oblivion. CORINTHIAN, yes. The other three, ten thousand times, NO! why on earth have you chosen to do these lethal and immature works when the CONVENIENT MARRIAGE, TALISMAN RING, ROYAL ESCAPE, and PENHALLOW still await attention? When these are on the market again, I should prefer to see them reissued rather than those childish and utterly frightful books put out again. Include in this category, if you please, POWDER AND PATCH! I hope so much that it may not be too late to stop this. It will embitter my life!

  Despite Frere’s assurance that the unloved titles had been included without his knowledge and would “remain in limbo as long as you want them to,” nothing was done to stop publication. The books (Georgette described them as “badges of shame”) appeared against her wishes—the last publication of The Great Roxhythe and Simon the Coldheart during her lifetime.23 While the early novels were naturally not as mature as her later work there was nothing in them of which to be ashamed and many readers enjoyed them. But Georgette found their reissue excruciating.

  Her latest Regency novel was a welcome distraction from the unpleasant news. For once she did not “altogether dislike” the new book, thinking it superior to Sophy and even telling Frere it “has got a plot.” The Quiet Gentleman had another of her unlikely heroines, whose calm, practical demeanor (“try as I will I cannot be romantic!”) was a perfect foil for the histrionics of Georgette’s own favorite, the Dowager. Georgette enjoyed writing The Quiet Gentleman “except when I remembered that its proceeds are destined for the National Drain.” She and Ronald had already paid £4,000 to “the sharks” (as she described the Inland Revenue) that year, and in April she learned that once they had paid another £2,000 they should have “cleared off all the back-surtax and shan’t get any more demands until June–actually!–when there will be P.A.Y.E. for Heron!”