A month later, finding that she was constantly tired and with her energy sapped by midday, Georgette decided to escape the misery of ill-health, fuel shortages, and blackouts and fly to Gibraltar for a fortnight’s respite. It was with real anticipation that she and Ronald flew out of England on a holiday which Georgette hoped would restore some of her vigor. Those hopes were dashed on the first day when she slipped on a marble floor and wrenched the ligaments in her bad leg. It was a disastrous start to their trip and the discovery that “every hotel is built on the side of a steep hill” made Gibraltar less than ideal for the sort of convalescence she had envisaged. Despite the difficulties a fortnight later she arrived home in such good spirits that she decided she “must indeed be much better.”
By May, however, the pain in her back and legs was so severe that Georgette was unable to write. She had been enduring more and more pain and although he knew she was stoical by nature, Ronald found it increasingly difficult to cope with watching her in such agony. A few days later, having done his best to alleviate the pain and keep her at home, her doctor had no choice but to admit her to Guy’s Hospital. Georgette was seriously ill. She knew, without being told, that there was not much time left. After weeks of tests and examinations Ronald hoped to be able to bring her home with a day and a night nurse to look after her, but it proved to be impossible.
A few months earlier, Georgette had told Joyce Weiner that “I never wanted to live (as too many of my forebears have) to a very unripe old age, & my hope now is that I may go quickly, & NOT by inches.” A moment later she had looked from her window and added, “The sun has now pierced through the lowering cloud, & I instantly feel a bit better.” She wanted to be well again and to get on with the writing she had loved for so long. But age and imminent death would not permit it. By the time lung cancer was diagnosed she was in the last weeks of her life and Ronald told friends that she was passing “most of the time in a rather comatose state due, no doubt, to the drugs she is given.” Every afternoon and evening her husband sat at her bedside, waiting for the lucid moments when his companion of nearly fifty years would look into his eyes and recognize him. Ronald was there when, on 4 July 1974, Georgette Heyer died.
AFTERWORD
Two days after Georgette’s death the first obituaries appeared. The world learned that “the Queen of Regency Romance” was dead at the age of seventy-one and her fans finally discovered that Georgette Heyer was also Mrs. Ronald Rougier. Major newspapers around the world offered tributes with the Daily Telegraph calling her the “20th Century Jane Austen.” A week later Georgette’s funeral was held at St. Paul’s Knightsbridge. It was a simple service with only her closest friends and family in attendance. In keeping with her wishes, Georgette was cremated and her ashes scattered.
A month after the funeral Ronald went north for an extended holiday. Georgette’s death had affected him deeply and he hoped that time away would help him to recover from his loss. On his return he contacted the well-known writer A.S. Byatt and invited her to lunch to discuss a possible article about Georgette’s life and writing. Ronald had admired Byatt’s 1969 Nova article and the radio interview she had given on the BBC’s Kaleidoscope program the day after Georgette’s death. He told Byatt she could have access to his wife’s notebooks and family photographs and also promised introductions to those who had known Georgette best. It was suggested that the piece coincide with the publication of My Lord John.
Rumors that Georgette had left a number of unpublished manuscripts had prompted an influx of letters to The Bodley Head from fans urging the firm to publish anything they had by Georgette Heyer. But the only uncompleted manuscript was My Lord John and Max Reinhardt had already asked one of his editors, Jill Black, to help Ronald prepare it for publication. Although Georgette had completed the first eighty thousand words of the novel there were still another twenty-five thousand words in rough draft, with a great many pencilled notes and corrections to be deciphered and incorporated. Ronald took on the job of compiling the book’s glossary and also wrote the historical note needed to end the book, given that Georgette’s manuscript stopped in mid-sentence. He and Jill Black worked on My Lord John through the winter and finalized the proofs late in March 1975. Max Reinhardt scheduled the novel for October publication with hopes of a great success.
A. S. Byatt’s piece appeared in The Sunday Times three days after publication of My Lord John. The first independent biographical account of Georgette Heyer ever published, the eight-page article also included many never-before-seen photographs of Georgette from the Heyer family albums. Entitled “The Ferocious Reticence of Georgette Heyer,” Byatt had written a magnificent tribute to Georgette, full of new insightful commentary and humorous anecdotes. Ronald was delighted with the piece and told a friend: “Seeing Antonia Byatt had never actually met Georgette I thought it extremely perceptive.”
On 26 August 1976, almost a year after the publication of My Lord John and two years after his wife’s death, Ronald took his own life. He had cancer of the jaw and was lonely without Georgette. In his precise, careful way, he had decided to end things while he was still in control of his mind and body. There was no fuss or scandal, just a brief report in The Times and an obituary written by his son. Richard mourned his father deeply and found the manner of his death very difficult. Ronald had arranged his suicide in the same methodical way that he had once devised the plots for Georgette’s detective novels. His intention was to spare his son and his family pain, but in the end it was unavoidable.
Richard inherited the bulk of his parents’ estate including those of Georgette’s copyrights not owned by Booker (he eventually bought these back). His mother’s death had not diminished her sales. By 1977 Pan were selling more than a million copies of her novels a year in Britain alone. A year later The Bodley Head announced The Historical Novel Prize in memory of Georgette Heyer, with an award of £1,500 and a publishing contract for the winner. Sponsored jointly by The Bodley Head and the Heyer Estate, over the next decade the prize became an important part of the literary calendar, attracting between two hundred and three hundred manuscripts annually and launching the careers of some fine writers. In 1992 it was felt that the administration of the prize (and finding manuscript readers) had become too difficult and The Bodley Head reluctantly decided to bring it to a close.
Despite her intensely private personal life, Georgette Heyer remains a very public writer. Her novels have been continuously in print since their first publication in 1921 and she is still selling. Interest in her life and writing also continues. In 1983, the year before he died, Frere told Jane Aiken Hodge that he thought the intelligentsia would eventually recognize Georgette’s achievement and that she would become a respectable subject for study and debate. Rosemary Sutcliff and A.S. Byatt were the first to give her serious recognition and in 1970 Germaine Greer included a lengthy commentary on Regency Buck in The Female Eunuch. Since then a growing number of scholars and commentators have written about Georgette Heyer and her novels in articles, essays, papers, chapters, theses, and books.
Georgette Heyer has been included in more than twenty literary companions and dictionaries, including the Dictionary of National Biography and the Oxford Companion to English Literature. She is cited eighty times in the complete Oxford English Dictionary. In 2008 the Public Lending Right Registry listed her fourth in the top twenty of the “classic writers” most frequently borrowed from UK libraries, along with Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl, Agatha Christie, Beatrix Potter, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Daphne du Maurier, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Shakespeare among others. The writer George MacDonald Fraser described her as “a splendid historical novelist, certainly one of the best of the last century.” Carmen Callil and Colm Tóibín included The Grand Sophy in The 200 Best Novels in English since 1950 and in 1964 a Professor of Military Studies at the Belgium Military Academy declared the battle scenes in An Infamous Army “the nearest to reality that one will ever come without having been there.” Today, Geo
rgette Heyer continues to be one of the great bestsellers.
In her fifty-year career Georgette wrote fifty-five novels and never had a failure. With the exception of the five books that remain suppressed, all of her titles are still in print. She wrote across several different genres and historical periods but it is with the English Regency that her name has become synonymous. Georgette Heyer was a superlatively good writer and is today universally recognized as the creator of the Regency genre of historical fiction.
Although the Regency world she created was faithful in its historical detail, it was also a carefully constructed entity which reflected the Edwardian values, ideas, and social mores with which she had grown up. Georgette felt at home in the Regency because it was an era which reached forward into her childhood and writing about it enabled her to escape to a time which felt safe, comfortable, and familiar. In the twenty-first century it is her version of the Regency which has set the standard for research, writing, and the re-creation of the period. Since her death her books have continued to inspire readers and writers across the globe. Georgette Heyer’s literary legacy endures.
REFERENCES TO PUBLISHED SOURCES
Chapter 1
“most amusing” Winifred Whitehead, Wimbledon 1885–1965, W. Whitehead, Wimbledon, 1979, p.12.
Chapter 1
“As she grew older” Darley Dale, The Shepherd’s Fairy, The Religious Tract Society, London, 1888, pp. 163–4.
Chapter 1
“We are never unkind” J.W. Fortescue, The Story of a Red Deer, Pan Books, London, 1976 [First published in 1897], p.6.
Chapter 2
“The most popular master” G.S. Szlumper quoted in Frank Miles and Graeme Cranch, Kings College School, Kings College School, 1979, p.210.
Chapter 2
“I don’t want Helen” Georgette Heyer, Helen, Part I: chapter VI.
Chapter 2
“Himself had taught Helen” Helen, Part I: chapter VI.
Chapter 3
“Never were more inveterate” Helen, Part II: chapter I.
Chapter 3
“the afternoons were free” Helen, Part II: chapter I.
Chapter 3
“We thought the War” Helen, Part II: chapter IV.
Chapter 3
“She was not cold” Helen, Part II: chapter IV.
Chapter 3
“the persuasive English officer” John Hales, Obituary Notice, The Times, 22.6.1925, p.16, col. b.
Chapter 3
“Mamma always admitted” Josephine, Diana, and Christine Pullein-Thompson, Fair Girls and Gray Horses, Allison & Busby. London, 1997, p.10.
Chapter 3
“Carola was five” Carola Oman, An Oxford Childhood, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1976, p.76.
Chapter 4
“Smilingly, she called herself ” Jane Mander, “Two Clever Writers: the Work of Georgette Heyer and Carola Oman,” The Sun, New Zealand, [n.d. but early 1929 from textual evidence within the article].
Chapter 4
“young men abandoned” Jane Aiken Hodge, The Private World of Georgette Heyer, chapter 1.
Chapter 4
“a young girl’s wildly romantic” Hodge, The Private World of Georgette Heyer, chapter 1.
Chapter 5
“There’s no peace for me in England” Heyer, The Great Roxhythe, Book IV, chapter VI.
Chapter 6
“the best historical novels” George Heyer, “History in Fiction,” 1923, from the minutes of the Wimbledon Literary and Scientific Society, transcribed for me by Mrs. Pauline Prest in 2002.
Chapter 6
“There’s a deal of give and take” Heyer, Instead of the Thorn, chapter 26.
Chapter 6
“considered too frank” Ainslie Ellis, “Hoppé at Ninety” in the British Journal of Photography, 19 April 1968, p.326.
Chapter 7
“Historical novels are of two kinds” Isabelle Wentworth Lawrence, Boston Evening Transcript, 23 May 1925 in Mary Fahnestock-Thomas, Georgette Heyer: A Critical Retrospective, Prinny World Press, Alabama, 2001, p.69.
Chapter 7
“What is it, then” Austin Dobson, Epilogue to Eighteenth Century Vignettes (second series), 1894 in The Complete Poetical Works of Austin Dobson, Oxford University Press, 1923.
Chapter 7
“at the close of literally dozens” Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, Penguin, London, 1992.
Chapter 8
“Suddenly, as though something had snapped” Helen, Part III: chapter VII.
Chapter 8
“misplaced attempt” Helen, Part III: chapter VII.
Chapter 8
“She unearthed the manuscript” Helen, Part III: chapter VII.
Chapter 8
“writing with an easy pen” Hodge, Private World, chapter 1.
Chapter 8
“unspeakably slimy and slippery” Elsie M. Kimball, letter dated 12 February 1926, The Elsie M. Kimball Papers, Mount Holyoke College, Archives and Special Collections.
Chapter 9
“cheap and easy device” “Latest Works of Fiction,” The New York Times Book Review, 27.5.28, p.17.
Chapter 9
“He was not Romance” Heyer, Pastel, chapter XXVII.
Chapter 9
“you all fall into the error” Pastel, chapter XXIII.
Chapter 9
“Life was bound up with Norman” Pastel, chapter XXIII.
Chapter 9
“much faith in the lasting qualities” Pastel, chapter VI.
Chapter 9
“I used to think” Pastel, chapter XX.
Chapter 9
“my own authors” Jane Mander, “Women Writers I Have Known,” The Sun, New Zealand, 1933.
Chapter 9
“very shy and brusque” Helen, Part I: chapter VI.
Chapter 9
“Lorna Coote was thirty-three” David Footman, Halfway East, Heinemann, 1935, pp.52–3.
Chapter 9
“forget the accident of her birth” Heyer, Barren Corn, chapter III.
Chapter 10
“In the first version, he wins her” Hodge, Private World, chapter 1.
Chapter 10
“Cynthia Bechler was a historical novelist” Joanna Cannan, No Walls of Jasper, Ernest Benn, 1930, p.34.
Chapter 10
“I’ve been trying to imagine” Cannan, No walls of Jasper, p.158.
Chapter 10
“spent over a year” Mander, “Two Clever Writers,” The Sun, New Zealand.
Chapter 11
“‘And now,’ said Vidal silkily” Heyer, Devil’s Cub, chapter VI.
Chapter 11
“At the time, Mother was writing” Richard Rougier in “She Wasn’t Like Other Mothers,” Woman’s Own, 2 September 1978, p.25.
Chapter 11
“at this time” Hodge, Private World, chapter 2.
Chapter 11
“Somebody in the Westminster Record” John Byers, The Record and West London News, 20 May 1933, p.6.
Chapter 12
“I said last week” Dorothy Sayers, The Sunday Times, 1 April 1934.
Chapter 12
“There was not a bookshop” John Attenborough, In Living Memory: Hodder & Stoughton Publishers 1868–1975, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1975, p.98.
Chapter 12
“the last of the puritans” Attenborough, In Living Memory, p.122.
Chapter 12
“nothing in them” Attenborough, In Living Memory, p.103.
Chapter 12
“it was too much of an affront” Attenborough, In Living Memory, p.233.
Chapter 13
“You think that if a man” Heyer, They Found Him Dead, chapter 13.
Chapter 13
“You see, I know myself ” They Found Him Dead, chapter 1.
Chapter 13
“One of Heinemann’s stars” John St. John, William Heinemann: A Century of Publishing 1890–1990, Hein
emann, 1990, p.210.
Chapter 14
“understood and liked authors” St. John, William Heinemann, p.204.
Chapter 15
“Jim tells me” They Found Him Dead, chapter 9.
Chapter 15
“Here is a romance” The Times Literary Supplement, 13 November 1937, p.869.
Chapter 15
“One of the clearest” The Daily Mail¸ November 1937.
Chapter 17
“tackling a crossword puzzle” Letter from Richard Rougier to James P. Devlin and quoted in Devlin’s article “The Mysteries of Georgette Heyer: A Janeite’s Life of Crime” in The Armchair Detective no. 17, Vol. 3, summer 1984, p.301.
Chapter 18
“Once more unto the breach” Shakespeare, Henry V, Act 3, scene 1.
Chapter 18
“we band of brothers” Shakespeare, Henry V, Act 4, scene 3.
Chapter 18
“Evans, Hall and Oliver” St. John, William Heinemann, p.301.
Chapter 18
“I see now that there is a great deal” Heyer, The Corinthian, chapter 7. Page 215
Georgette Heyer Page 40