Georgette Heyer was born on 16 August 1902, exactly one week after the coronation of Edward VI. A child of the Edwardian age, she was raised by Victorian parents on a robust diet of music and good books – for which latter she had a voracious appetite. An infant prodigy, she read at the age of three and began making up stories as a young child.

Her parents, George and Sylvia Heyer, adored her but she grew closest to her father after whom she was named. He was a Classics graduate of Cambridge and an immensely popular, charismatic man who wrote poetry, loved the theatre and ensured that his daughter grew up on a rich diet of the classical Greeks, the Renaissance poets, Shakespeare, Austen, and Dickens.

Perhaps a writing career was inevitable, but Georgette Heyer’s first notable story was a serial to be told aloud to her convalescent younger brother, Boris. Entitled The Black Moth, it was a ‘wildly romantic tale’ with an Earl in disguise, a fiendish villain, and a beautiful, wistful heroine desired by both. It was Georgette’s father who encouraged his seventeen-year-old daughter to write out the story and try for publication. In 1920, just six months after her eighteenth birthday, Georgette received a contract offer for The Black Moth from Constable. It was a moment of triumph but, ever practical, the young writer immediately sent the contract to the Society of Authors asking for their advice: ‘Herewith the contract of which I wrote. I should be very glad if you would give it your attention – especially clause 17.’ A useful correspondence ensued with the pleasing result that Georgette Heyer signed the contract and saw her first novel published several months later in October 1921. She was just nineteen years old. It was later reported that the novel had ‘caused a sensation’ and a second book soon followed. Her feet were now firmly set upon the path to literary fame but it would be some time before she would become a household name. 

In the first ten years of her career, Georgette Heyer wrote a dozen novels: four of them with contemporary settings, four with eighteenth-century settings, two medieval novels, one Elizabethan novel, and one set in the seventeenth century after the Restoration of Charles II. She was trying her hand at the serious historical story, the swashbuckler, novels of modes and manners, and books about life for naïve young women in England between the wars. She was successful from the first with each of her books enjoying good sales and multiple printings.

But life was not always easy for Heyer and on 16 June 1925 tragedy struck. Her father had returned home from playing tennis with her fiancé, Ronald Rougier, when George suffered a massive heart attack and died in front of Georgette. It would be ‘the great cataclysm of her life’ and a shock and a grief from which she would never fully recover. They had been best friends, confidants, each other’s first readers, and she always said that ‘he was more like a brother than a father’. But, brought up in the British tradition of ‘the stiff upper lip’ and believing that overt displays of emotion were the height of vulgarity, Georgette struggled with a loss she could not bear to articulate. She turned inward, repressing her feelings, and eventually finding an outlet for them in her writing.

She married Ronald just two months after her father’s death – embarking on what would be a long and happy marriage – but it would be two years before she returned to the writing she loved. In 1928 she published two novels – a two-book-a-year habit she would maintain (with just three exceptions) until 1942. Her first detective novel came out in February 1932 on the day her only child was born and she always claimed that Richard George Rougier was her finest achievement. It wasn’t until 1935 and her nineteenth book that she wrote her first Regency novel. Regency Buck would be the first of twenty-six novels set in that remarkable nine-year period when George III was finally declared mad (he suffered from porphyria) and his son, George, Prince of Wales, became Prince Regent. It would prove to be the perfect era in which to set her carefully-crafted historical romances, but she would write another dozen books, of which only three were Regencies – before finally settling on the period and making it her own.

In 1942, Georgette published her tenth detective novel. Entitled Penhallow, both her agent L.P. Moore and her friend and publisher A.S. Frere of Heinemann encouraged her to believed that the book was a tour de force and the one to make the critics ‘sit up and take notice’. She was to be disappointed. The book sold well but it did not garner the huge sales or glowing reviews for which she yearned. That reaction was reserved for her next novel.

It was her fifth Regency-set novel but, despite its bland cover, poor quality paper (on account of the wartime paper shortage), and limited publicity Friday’s Child soon sold out its first printing of 70,000 copies. Within two years, the book had sold over 250,000 copies and Georgette could not help but see the difference between it and Penhallow. For the next thirty years it would be the Regency novels that would bring her the acclaim and the sales she longed for. And although she might dismiss them as ‘a lovely romantic bit of froth’ she also described these beloved novels as ‘unquestionably good escapist literature’.

The fact is that Georgette Heyer was a superb writer – a prose stylist of the first order. She was a master of ironic comedy and her historical novels abound with wit and humour. She loved to laugh and those in her small close-knit circle of friends all remarked on her vibrant sense of humour. She could be acerbic and difficult, she held strongly-voiced opinions, but she was also intensely shy. She was intensely private – A.S. Byatt described her as ‘ferociously reticent’ – and hated talking about her work. The only interview she ever gave was done on the basis that the journalist ask her nothing about her books or writing. She never appeared in public and only rarely signed books. Georgette Heyer was a keen observer with a perceptive eye for human foibles. Her books are rich in language, plot and character. She is an author to whom readers love to return time and time again, for among her many gifts is laughter and comfort in times of trouble. She is loved the world over and even now, fifty years after her death, her books live on.

Jennifer Kloester