Georgette Heyer

by Jennifer Kloester

  Georgette was deeply moved by Nora Samuelli’s letter; she replied to it and carefully put it away among her private papers.

  On New Year’s Eve Georgette contracted flu. She canceled her engagements and told Reinhardt that her new novel, Frederica, had not progressed because “I am not one who works well—or at all—under adversity.” It was not true. She had often worked when things were difficult, writing some of her best books when beset by worry. Her period novels, in particular, had always been an escape from adversity. Hardship in the real world heightened the pleasure of her retreat into the fictional realm.

  Despite all her complaints and self-criticism, writing gave Georgette immense pleasure. Even in the sheltered world she had created for herself in Albany, she could not escape life’s vagaries, uncertainties, trials, or tragedies, whereas in the constructed world of the novel she could order things as she liked and ensure her (deserving) characters’ happy endings. It was not all fantasy, however, for her literary worlds were linked to the real world via a wealth of carefully researched historical detail. Georgette’s ability to bring the past to life and make her readers feel as though they were there is one of the reasons for her enduring success. The escape was not just fictional, it was historical as well, and somehow there was comfort in that.

  Reinhardt was sympathetic about her illness and sent her three cheerful bits of news: Penguin had offered an unsolicited £3,000 advance for the paperback edition of False Colors, Longmans wanted to produce it in a school edition, and False Colors had sold over fifty thousand copies in two months. Georgette was delighted—especially with the Penguin offer, “for, as far as I know, they’ve never till now shown any interest in my deathless works.” (They had published three of her detective novels in the 1940s and Devil’s Cub in 1953. The Penguin edition of False Colors appeared in 1966.) She was also agreeable to being read in schools and had long since given Braille a blanket permission to produce any of her books at their discretion.

  She had barely begun Frederica when Reinhardt returned from one of his regular visits to Charlie Chaplin in Switzerland and wrote to enquire if it was all right to ask for a blurb. She sent him “several indignant curses for DARING to ask me” and explained that “all my faithful public wants to know is that it is the Regency mixture as before.” Possibly inspired by her recent holiday with her step-grandsons, Georgette had given her heroine two younger brothers and informed her publisher that “I do WANT little Felix to be carried off in a balloon—waving joyously to his brothers and sisters, & followed, on the ground, by my longsuffering and very fashionable hero, driving his curricle.” The blurb which followed would eventually appear, word for word, on Frederica’s dust jacket. Reinhardt’s response was flattering: “With these two paragraphs of yours alone we have already booked orders for several thousand copies of Frederica.”

  Sales of Georgette’s books were booming. In 1964 she had thirty-two books in print out of a possible forty-four (six were suppressed); Pan had sold forty-seven thousand copies of Beauvallet in just three months, and she was finally taking off in America. A year earlier Dutton had taken over the publication of her books from Putnam. The new firm had done well with The Nonesuch and False Colors, which was positively reviewed in Time magazine in February 1964. Despite some amusing inaccuracies Georgette could not help but be pleased by the Time review (“repulsive but eminently quotable”). Reinhardt thought it excellent and told her of his ambition to make False Colors her bestselling book.

  In the meantime Frederica was progressing slowly. Having “discovered” her heroine’s younger brother’s enthusiasm for steam locomotion and coal gas Georgette was obliged to visit the London Library several times for information. By June she had “perpetrated some 48,000 words, & am now staring at the thing & Asking Myself (a) What the hell is this all about? [I don’t know] (b) Will this work live? [NO] (c) What the hell is going to happen? [God may know: I don’t] (d) Do I WANT to write the damned thing? [NO!—or anything else!]” In spite of her grumbles on reading through the manuscript she actually found it was neither “so long or as dull as I’d thought.” After more than forty years of writing Georgette’s self-deprecatory habits were established to the point of almost being an intrinsic part of her writing ritual.

  Her plan to finish Frederica in time for the cricket Test at Lord’s (she had tickets and was resolved to “use at least three of them, WHATEVER”) was dramatically interrupted when she was rushed to Guy’s Hospital. She had been suffering stomach pains for weeks and the trouble was eventually diagnosed as kidney stones. In the 1960s this meant a major operation and a month in hospital. Friends and family visited and Max Reinhardt sent her the proofs of Charlie Chaplin’s forthcoming Autobiography to read once she was convalescent. “Chaplin amused me,” she told him. “It was the only modern book which did amuse me: I returned to Dickens—a sure sign of old age!” She also heard from Derek Priestley of Heinemann who, not knowing of her illness, had written to ask if she would consider allowing the firm to bring out False Colors in their Uniform edition. Her belated reply was brief and to the point: “As for your extraordinary proposition about False Colors, I imagine you must know very well what the answer is.” She did not hear from Priestley again.

  Georgette left Guy’s Hospital in mid-August with a scar which the hospital staff described “as A Beautifully Neat Incision, & Ronald as A Bloody Great Gash. Ronald is right. It is some fifteen inches long, & has severed all the ‘torsion’ muscles. Hence the pain I am still suffering.” She was lucky to be alive and her surgeon told her she could not expect a full recovery for six months. She optimistically took Frederica with her to Greywalls in September but after such a long break it took time to find her way back into the story. Her surgeon’s promise of a Christmas recovery proved optimistic and her own doctor told her that it would be a year before she was one hundred percent fit again.

  Georgette was suffering from painful adhesions and relentless fatigue. On informing her doctor that “a morning’s shopping put paid to any real work for that day,” he “brutally retorted that it was a bloody good job, since it would stop me from doing too much.” She was determined to finish Frederica, however, if only to get on with the next “much more amusing book”—ideas for which insisted on “obtruding & have to be repressed.” Her feeling was that Frederica would “sell on the reputation, the next shall be Miss Heyer’s Comeback.”

  The idea of spring publication for Frederica soon proved to be a vain hope. In mid-December Georgette remembered that she had promised it to Woman’s Journal for serialization which meant the book could not come out before the autumn. She felt dreadful about the delay. “I wish I weren’t failing you like this,” she told Reinhardt. “I seethe & seethe, for Never before have I fallen down on a contract. Try to forgive me!” But her publisher could not have been as hard on her as she was on herself and Reinhardt had no intention of pressuring her. He already knew how she fretted over deadlines—even apologizing if a manuscript arrived a day later than promised. He thought Georgette “An absolute darling” and “A marvelous pro” and told her not to worry about the delay. Greatly relieved, Georgette relaxed over the festive season and she and Ronald spent a peaceful Christmas Day at Richard and Susie’s newly leased flat in Gloucester Road.

  It was spring 1964 before she finished Frederica and Georgette told her publisher that it was too long and would need to be cut. Although she knew that her readers loved her longer books, she had never before left a Regency manuscript hanging for six months and was concerned about the effect on the final novel. When Reinhardt read it, however, he declared it first-rate and encouraged her to leave it long. He also ventured to ask if Georgette would say she liked the book so they could quote her. Her answer was explicit: “No, I do Not like Frederica—and if I did, nothing would induce me to say so! For publication, too—!” She knew that those who had read the novel liked it but when she compared it “to the three, of the same genre, which I do think good, I could weep!” But she had a
lso thought poorly of Sylvester, Venetia, and The Unknown Ajax at the time of their writing; only later had her opinion changed. It would eventually change for Frederica, too, despite the discovery of her one unwitting error.

  Mistakes in a Georgette Heyer novel are rare and mostly relate to her sending her characters to places which did not exist in that form at the time when her story was set, such as the Brighton Pavilion, the Promenade Grove, or the Pantheon Bazaar. In Frederica, however, her blunder was to send her hero to a place which did not exist at all. Setting the book in London, she had her hero take the heroine’s little brother to a foundry in Soho (to see a pneumatic lift). Georgette had mistakenly taken a reference to a foundry in Soho in a book on steam power as meaning Soho in London rather than Soho near Birmingham.28 A fan had noticed the mistake in the Woman’s Journal serial and written to tell her.

  It was too late to correct the error and, devastated by her slipup, Georgette wrote to Reinhardt and Frere about it: “Far, far worse than any mere misprint is my own major error” and “I always did think Soho, London, was a queer locality for a foundry!” She had meant to check it but the surgery had pushed it from her mind and the error had remained unaltered. For forty years, Georgette’s idiosyncratic research methods had proven remarkably effective in enabling her to recreate a vivid sense of the past. There is no doubt, however, that there were risks in limiting her research to just the London Library and her own private reference collection.

  Since first writing about the Regency in 1935, Georgette had built up a personal library of some two thousand volumes with many general reference books and dictionaries of biography, phrase, slang, dialect, place-names, Latin, French, Spanish, and English. She had collected a range of history books and texts about specific subjects such as snuff-boxes, coaching inns, the military, London, etiquette, and clothing. For details of life in the period and its language she favored primary sources over secondary, and owned works by most of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century diarists. Other contemporary books about Regency life included the English Spy, The Hermit in London, Memoirs of the Court of England during the Regency, Harriette Wilson’s autobiography, and Georgette’s own particular favorite, Pierce Egan’s Life in London—a treasure trove of Regency argot and etiquette (she had her own magnificent leather-bound, two-volume edition which she lovingly polished with a special cloth). Jane Austen was a vital source and Georgette regularly sought inspiration, vocabulary, and phrases from her favorite author’s letters and novels.

  Georgette’s extensive knowledge of Regency fashion came mainly from studying contemporary magazines, including La Belle Assemblée, the Ladies’ Monthly Museum, The Gentlemen’s Magazine, Ackermann’s Repository, the Mirror of Fashion, and pamphlets such as Neckclothitania. Georgette also used books such as Paterson’s Roads, Advice to Young Sportsmen, The True Art of the Fence, Nimrod on Hunting, Household Management and Expenditure, and Beaux of the Regency, and would jot down useful bits in her (idiosyncratic) notebooks. These were then used as a ready reference for details on everything from costume to carriages, people, places, prices, and the postal system.

  She also compiled alphabetical lists of slang terms and popular expressions and gathered colloquial phrases which still made sense to the modern reader. Georgette’s Regency world comes to life with the language of the period precisely because she stayed close to the sources written at the time. While her method of research was an effective (if somewhat cloistered) approach to the past, it did occasionally trip her up. To her great relief, only the one reader ever wrote to her about the Soho error in Frederica.

  At Easter Boris and Evelyn joined them at Rye for the golf. Her brother had recently left the Lord Crewe Arms and taken a lease on an inn at Bedale in Yorkshire. Georgette thought running a pub excessively strenuous but it seemed to suit Boris. He did not see his sister all that often but they kept in touch, and Georgette and Ronald sometimes visited if they were traveling north. In May they went to Scotland again. They could afford several holidays a year now and were planning their first trip to Sweden, where Georgette’s novels were being reprinted, in June.

  The year 1965 marked the sesquicentennial of the Battle of Waterloo and her publishers in America, Germany, and Sweden were reissuing An Infamous Army and were “all very much alive to the significance of that book in this year.” Georgette also expected Heinemann to seize the opportunity to push An Infamous Army. She was incensed to discover that, so far from promoting it, they had actually let their stock of An Infamous Army run out: “When I recall the press it had, too, it makes me rage! Why, to this day the book is recommended to Sandhurst cadets by their instructors!”29

  It was another black mark against Heinemann and her frustration with the firm eventually culminated in what Georgette called “a Splendid row.” The core of the problem was Heinemann’s apparent inability to keep her books on the shelves. Georgette was puzzled as to “why, having such a Valuable Property as Me, they make no effort whatsoever to cash in on me.” It was not entirely true, but she found it maddening to receive regular letters from fans telling her they could not find one of her popular titles in the shops. It was a stark contrast to the activities of The Bodley Head who were determined to make an even bigger success of Frederica than they had with False Colors.

  Frederica came out in September 1965 with Reinhardt predicting that it would be a big seller over Christmas. He was right. Frederica hit the top of the bestseller list on publication and remained there well into the new year. Foyle’s wanted it for their book club and Pan were offering £4,500 against Penguin’s £3,000 for the paperback rights. Georgette learned of the book’s success by telegram. She and Ronald were in Ireland, holidaying with Richard and Susie and the children, when she received the good news: “Congratulations subscription Frederica at least 47,000 love Max.” But it paled into insignificance against Susie’s announcement that she was pregnant.

  28 After much searching in the London Library, it appears that the book was John Sewell’s, Elementary Treatise on Steam and Locomotion (1852) which mentions Watt and Soho on one page and on the next talks about Watt and Albion-mills, London. There is no mention of Birmingham.

  29 The following year (1966) Heinemann licensed Hodder & Stoughton to bring out An Infamous Army as one of their “Library of Great Historical Novels as chosen by Rosemary Sutcliff.” Rosemary Sutcliff wrote a special three-page introduction for the book which began, “For me, the Regency Novels of Miss Georgette Heyer have always been perfect reading.”

  Part V

  LADY OF QUALITY

  1966–1974

  34

  I know it’s useless to talk about technique in these degenerate days—but no less a technician than Noël Coward reads me because he says my technique is so good. I’m proud of that.

  —Georgette Heyer

  The baby was due in February and Georgette and Ronald were delighted at the prospect of becoming grandparents. Georgette returned home from her holiday to further cheerful news: Frederica was already being reprinted and British filmmaker Herbert Wilcox was planning to produce False Colors as a television series in America. Wilcox’s wife was the famous English actress, Anna Neagle, who was a fan as well as a friend of Georgette’s. It was Anna who had inspired her to create Lady Denville in False Colors, having once asked if she “could write a nice middle aged part for her.” Believing that Wilcox would do her work justice, this time Georgette was enthusiastic about the television proposal.

  She did not count on the scheme, however, and thought that if it did come off it would not happen quickly because “this color TV thing is a new idea, & I’ve no doubt it will take time to get it started.” Nevertheless, it was an enticing proposition, and Joyce Weiner felt it would do no harm for a British producer to be promoting her books in the United States. Joyce Weiner had been working on Georgette’s American publisher with the result that Dutton’s had doubled her advance and were making Frederica their number one book for the season. Joyce’s
efforts looked like returning almost £14,000—a reflection of the “staggering interest” the Americans were now showing in Georgette’s work.

  Georgette was laid up again that autumn with a mosquito bite (incurred in Sweden in June) which would not heal. Her doctor was talking about specialists and skin grafts—suggestions Georgette strongly resisted, remembering the arsenic treatment specialists had subjected her to during the War. Instead she spent a good deal of time lying on the sofa (which she found a bore) and planning her next book. She had not worked out the details but in December told Reinhardt not to worry for “somehow, or other, the New Book does get written!” In return he sent her the firm’s latest production: a beautifully bound, limited edition (one of just two hundred copies) booklet containing the balloon scene from Frederica: The Bodley Head’s Christmas gift to their clients.

  On 23 February 1966 Georgette and Ronald were delighted to learn that Susie had given birth to a boy, Nicholas Julian Rougier. It was good news at a time when Georgette was once again badly worried about the state of her finances. Her optimism over her steadily growing income had recently been dented by the discovery that her accountants had “landed me in a real mess through their obsession with paying every penny I earn into the Company account, & paying nearly all bills out of this account…with the result that I now stand in the pleasing position of owing the Company something in the region of £20,000.” Susie urged them to find a new accountant and by late March, after more than a year of agonizing over the decision (and a decade of dissatisfaction), Georgette and Ronald finally sacked Rubens. They now engaged the accounting firm of Black, Geoghan & Till to manage their affairs. Georgette’s new accountant was Hale Crosse, a man with an international reputation for integrity and legitimately saving his authors money.