In April this year, as much of the world was coming to grips with our bizarre new normal, Indian writer Taran N Khan wrote of the pleasure of escaping into Georgette Heyer’s novels, as part of the series “The Art of Solitude.” He talks with feeling of his discovery of her works — very familiar to many Heyer readers — which he loved as much as those of P. G. Wodehouse…:

[…] But unlike Wodehouse, Heyer was not read by any of the men I knew. Her books, with their fading illustrated covers, were the shared inheritance of the women in my family – from my aunts, who had originally bought the volumes I pored over, to my older cousins, who led me to their favourite titles, like CotillionFriday’s Child and The Masqueraders.

Which meant that we were a group of adolescents in pre-liberalisation India intensely familiar with the rituals of fashionable nineteenth- century London. We knew, for instance, that debutantes wore muslins to balls. We could tell a Dandy from a Corinthian (both men of fashion), understood the rules of duelling and knew the modish time to go riding in Hyde Park. All this, while hardly leaving our home, let alone the city.

Again, all a very familiar, very relatable, and very moving story to Heyerites everywhere.

Read the whole piece here.

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