More On Their Personal Lives...

According to Hodge, the Heyer family moved from an address in Woodside to a slightly better address at 11 Homefield Road in Wimbledon in 1918. In 1923 they moved to 5 Ridgeway Place, to a newly built house. It was a four-bedroom house with a secluded garden on what was once the Ernle-Drax estate and was within easy walking distance of Wimbledon Commons. Hodge suggests that it probably had an air of country living about it.

In 1923 George Heyer gave a talk on "History in Fiction" to the select Wimbledon Literary and Scientific Society, and in 1925 he gave a talk on "The Humour of Dickens's Minor Characters".  In 1924 the Oxford University Press published his translation of Francois Villon's poems, saying they were proud to handle it. Georgette appeared with her father, playing Prince Arthur to his King John in a literary tableau at the age of 11, for the Literary and Scientific Society which he had been invited to join in 1909.
It is easy to imagine how much his appreciation of her first literary effort in The Black Moth must have meant to Georgette.

Next Entry: These Old Shades

Autobiographical In Nature

Georgette was so very private, but she reportedly told those who asked that they would find her in her work. A very cryptic remark. 

Critic and novelist A. S. Byatt wrote a long memorial piece for The Sunday Times when she died, based on interviews with her husband, her good friend, Carola Oman, and two of her publisher friends. That is about the only written source for any information on her early life. Hodge supplemented that info with interviews with her surviving family and friends and some of the letters to which she was given access when she wrote The Private World Of Georgette Heyer, published in 1984.

Heyer's brother, Frank, asserted that the four suppressed contemporary novels (Instead of the Thorn, Helen, Barren Corn, and Pastel) were somewhat autobiographical in nature, in particular Helen. But it is still a guessing game, as far as I can see, as to which parts of the novels were autobiographical.

We have Hodge's work, based on the only written and interview sources available, and we have our own opinions or surmises as to what she was really like and what her life was really like. She will forever remain somewhat of a mystery. I guess it should be that way because she obviously preferred it that way while she was living. But those of us who have had a love affair with her work still crave more.

Next Entry: Simon The Coldheart

Tags: A.S. Byatt, Jane Aiken Hodge

The Personal Lives of the Heyers...

The following information is taken from THE PRIVATE WORLD OF GEORGETTE HEYER by Jane Aiken Hodge.

Georgette was named after her father, George, who was also named after his father. The senior George Heyer came from Kharkov, Russia in the middle of the nineteenth century to settle in England where he married an English girl named Alice Waters. He was a fur merchant. There is little known about him or about why he immigrated to England, although it is posited that he may have been a fugitive from the Russian pogroms of that time.  Georgette's brother, Frank, remembered him as being bearded, having a strong accent, and being a practical joker.

Their son George was born in Islington in 1869, enlarging their family of three girls, Alice, Ilma, and Inez. George attended King's College School in London, read classics at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and wrote regularly for Cambridge's Granta. In the 1890s he became a teacher at Weymouth College, and later was invited to teach French at King's College School in 1897 when it moved to Wimbledon.

In 1901 he married Sylvia Watkins at the Church of St. Peter in Eltham. She was 25 at the time and the daughter of a Thames tugboat owner. She had been an outstanding student of cello and piano at the Royal College of Music. Georgette was born a year after her parents were married, George Boris four years after that, and Frank Dmitri five years later.

George was well thought of at King's College School where he also discovered a gift for fund raising. In 1903 he gave up teaching and held various other positions including organizing Queen Alexandra's Charity Matinees and acting as Secretary of the Memorial Theatre at Stratford. He also wrote occasionally for Punch.

Boris and Frank both attended Lancing College, with Boris going straight from there to a junior job with Bovril. Frank went on to Cambridge and became a schoolmaster, teaching for twenty-one years at Downside. 

Little is known about Heyer's life as a young girl. It is not known where she was educated. She herself said that she was educated at "various day schools", and that she never attended college. At the beginning of the 1914-1918 war she was for a time in Paris where her father was working when the war broke out. Hodge reports that Heyer recalled hearing the German gun, Big Bertha, before they returned to Wimbledon.

At that time she was enrolled for a while at The Study, one of Wimbledon's two main girls' schools, and, according to Hodge, the more socially conscious of the two; but no records of her time there are in existence today.

George Heyer was very active during the war. Even though he was over-age he obtained a captaincy in the Army Service Corps. He was a requisitioning officer in France, and was awarded the O.B.E. after the war. At that time he went to work for the War Office as a staff captain, but left, after suffering a severe illness, to become Appeal Secretary at King's College Hospital.
 
More on their personal lives to follow.

Next Entry: Daring For Its Time

Tags: Georgette Heyer, Punch, Pogroms, Jane Aiken Hodge

Well On Her Way

THE BLACK MOTH was well received, and a compulsive writer was born. Her second, third, fourth, and fifth novels were published by 1925 when she married, so she must have been doing a lot of writing while she was being courted by her husband-to-be.

Heyer met Ronald Rougier during Christmas of 1920. He was two years her senior. More about Rougier's background later.
Heyer went out with Rougier for five years, and they became engaged in the Spring of 1925, the year her fifth novel was published. A month following that engagement, George Heyer died suddenly of a heart attack after playing tennis with his future son-in-law. George Heyer's death, besides being a personal tragedy, was an economic disaster for the family, and Georgette became the central anchor for the famiy. Boris and Frank were only 19 and 15 at the time; Boris was working, but Frank would need to be put through school and Cambridge, and Georgette was the one who would do this.

Now she was not just writing compulsively, but because it was necessary to help take care of her family. She was already a well-established author, and when her sixth novel was published it was an instant success. These Old Shades sold 190,000 copies on publication without any publicity. It is speculated that this confirmed Heyer's belief that it wasn't necessary for her to spend a lot of time or effort on publicity, and this suited her very well. She and her husband were very private people, especially after her father's death. She was happy to be Mrs. Rougier in public and keep the author, Georgette Heyer, extremely private and secluded from the public.

Information taken from The Private World of Georgette Heyer by Jane Aiken Hodge.

Next Entry: Pseudonym, Stella Martin

Tags: Georgette Heyer, Ronald Rougier

Yes, I'm a Heyer Addict

I thought I'd list all her books in the order in which they were written. I now have at least one copy of all but two of her 55 books. And I'm very close to getting the other two. I plan to write about each one and also to put them in some kind of order of preference.
Books By Georgette Heyer In
Chronological Order ----------
1921 -- THE BLACK MOTH (GEORGIAN)
1923 -- THE GREAT ROXHYTHE (MEDIEVAL)*
1923 -- POWDER AND PATCH (G)*
1923 -- INSTEAD OF THE THORN (POST WWI)*
1925 -- SIMON THE COLDHEART (HENRY IV)
1926 -- THESE OLD SHADES (GEORGIAN/LOUIS XV)
1928 -- THE MASQUERADERS (GEORGIAN/JACOBITE)
1928 -- HELEN (POST WWI)
1929 -- BEAUVALLET (ELIZABETHAN)
1929 -- PASTEL (POST WWI)
1930 -- BARREN CORN (POST WWI)
1931 -- THE CONQUEROR (HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY OF WILLIAM)
1932 -- DEVIL's CUB (G)
1932 -- FOOTSTEPS IN THE DARK (MYSTERY)
1933 -- WHY SHOOT A BUTLER (M)
1934 -- THE CONVENIENT MARRIAGE (REGENCY)
1934 -- THE UNFINISHED CLUE (M)
1935 -- REGENCY BUCK (R)
1935 -- DEATH IN THE STOCKS (MYSTERY); published in U.S. as MERELY MURDER
1936 -- THE TALISMAN RING (R)
1936 -- BEHOLD, HERE'S POISON (M)
1937 -- AN INFAMOUS ARMY (M)
1937 -- THEY FOUND HIM DEAD (M)
1938 -- ROYAL ESCAPE (CHARLES II)
1938 -- A BLUNT INSTRUMENT (M)
1939 -- NO WIND OF BLAME (M)
1940 -- THE SPANISH BRIDE (R)
1940 -- THE CORINTHIAN (R); published in U.S. as BEAU WINDHAM
1941 -- FARO'S DAUGHTER (R)
1941 -- ENVIOUS CASCA (M)
1942 -- PENHALLOW (M)
1944 -- FRIDAY'S CHILD (R)
1946 -- THE RELUCTANT WIDOW (R)
1948 -- THE FOUNDLING (R)
1949 -- ARABELLA (R)
1950 -- THE GRAND SOPHY (R)
1951 -- THE QUIET GENTLEMAN (R)
1951 -- DUPLICATE DEATH (M)
1953 -- COTILLION (R)
1953 -- DETECTION UNLIMITED (M)
1954 -- THE TOLL-GATE (R)
1955 -- BATH TANGLE (R)
1956 -- SPRIG MUSLIN (R)
1957 -- APRIL LADY (R)
1957 -- SYLVESTER: OR THE WICKED UNCLE (R)
1958 -- VENETIA (R)
1959 -- THE UNKNOWN AJAX (R)
1960 -- PISTOLS FOR TWO, A COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES (R)
1961 -- A CIVIL CONTRACT (R)
1962 -- THE NONESUCH (R)
1963 -- FALSE COLOURS (R)
1965 -- FREDERICA (R)
1966 -- THE BLACK SHEEP (R)
1968 -- COUSIN KATE (R)
1970 -- CHARITY GIRL (R)
1972 -- LADY OF QUALITY (R)
1975 -- MY LORD JOHN (MEDIEVAL -- PUBLISHED POST-HUMOUSLY)
*The Great Roxhythe, Powder and Patch, and Instead of the Thorn were all published in 1923. On some lists, The Great Roxhythe is listed as her second book, while on others it is listed as the third. Jane Aiken Hodge, in The Private World of Georgette Heyer, lists Powder and Patch as the third published novel, which is probably correct. The first lists I ever saw listed it as second, so that is how I made my lists and ordered my entries in my other journal. However, I have changed this list and the order of entries in this journal to put Powder and Patch as the third published novel, as Hodge states it is.

Next Entry: A Story For A Convalescing Brother

Turning in New Directions, Part Two - -

Continuing on from Part One and referring to Beauvallet, Hodge states that it sold 86,000 copies and helped cement Heyer as an author whose historical books would sell.

In her personal life, things were changing once again. Ronald's partnership in the gas, coke, and light company did not work out, and they actually lost money. They borrowed money from Mrs. Heyer's sisters, bought a sports shop in Horsham, and moved to Sussex. They repaid the loan with interest over the years. Boris left his job with Bovril, lived over the shop, and helped Ronald run it.

A few miles from Horsham they found a four-bedroomed house in Colegate in Lower Breeding. Hodge describes it as a "rambling, two-storyed, comfortable" house that in layout was very much like the one at 5 Ridgeway Place. Georgette continued to write, and Heinemann continued to reprint the old titles.

Tags: Georgette Heyer, Jane Aiken Hodge, Beauvallet

Turning In New Directions, Part One

In 1928 Georgette joined her husband in Macedonia, which was to be his last prospecting job. In Macedonia she almost died from an anesthetic while in the dentist's chair, and lived in a "haunted house" where she wrote Pastel. Hodge posits that the climax of this book, where the main character, Frances, has her baby, shows how Georgette's mind was working; she was ready to have a baby. Pastel was dedicated to her mother.

Ronald had never really wanted to be a mining engineer, anyway, so the two decided to return to England. Georgette had shown that she could support them with her writing, and that is what she planned to do while Ronald looked about him for a new career.

By 1929 they were back in London, and for a time Ronald was a partner in a gas, light, and coke company. Georgette continued writing. She had tried five different publishers before settling on Heinemann. A. S. Frere, Heinemann's managing director, became a lifelong friend and confidant to Georgette. Hodge writes that Frere recalled that Georgette was discouraged about her career when they first met; then after the success of These Old Shades, Heinemann decided to take over the rights of her previous books, reprinting The Great Roxhythe and The Black Moth in 1929, and changing The Transformation of Philip Jettan to Powder and Patch in 1930.

In 1929 Georgette published Beauvallet with Heinemann. This new historical novel was set during the reign of Queen Elizabeth and was another fast-paced, swashbuckling story, centering on the hero. She dedicated this book to her brother Frank.

Tags: Georgette Heyer, Ronald Rougier, Jane Aiken Hodge

Ronald and Georgette

Georgette, according to her contemporaries was very beautiful as a young woman. She was tall, too, at 5'10". She was not athletic, and according to Hodge "took no exercise that she could avoid", but she did enjoy dancing.

She met Ronald Rougier in 1920 at Christmas when both families were staying at the Bushey Park Hotel. Ronald liked George Heyer immediately and was impressed by his intelligence. He also took to the young Georgette. In the 1920s young ladies were expected to bring their own partner when they were invited to dances, and Ronald became Georgette's.

Ronald, tall and handsome, was two years older than Georgette. His family were of Hugenot extraction, but had settled in York where they ran an import-export business. His first love, the navy, had to be given up because of poor eyesight, so he attended The Royal School of Mines to become a mining engineer. In 1922 he qualified as such and worked in Nigeria for a while. He also played first-class rugger with the Harlequins.

After dating for five years, he and Georgette became engaged in 1925. A month later, after playing tennis with his future son-in-law, George Heyer died of a sudden heart attack.

Two months later the wedding went ahead as planned on August 18, 1925 at St. Mary's in Wimbledon. Georgette wore a pretty little cloth hat and her wedding photo in Hodge shows her carrying a huge bouquet and standing next to a smiling and dapper Ronald. The ceremoney was kept simple with no bridesmaids.

As close as Georgette was to her father, she must have been suffering immensely from grief. Ronald must have been of great strength to her. She confided to a friend a few months later that a girl never got over the death of her father.

As a couple they were always reserved. Georgette was already an established writer, bringing in a good income with her novels. At all accounts they were a well-suited and happy couple. She learned to play bridge for her husband's sake, and, though she disliked exercise, walked many golf courses in his wake. A friend stated that she was 100% loyal to Ronald and that he was entirely devoted to her. They were married for almost fifty years.

She may have been Georgette Heyer to her fans, but she was Mrs. Ronald Rougier in her private life.

Tags: Ronald Rougier, Jane Aiken Hodge

These Old Shades

"What was her mysterious parentage?"

Published in 1926

THESE OLD SHADES by Georgette Heyer

These Old Shades was Heyer's sixth published novel, and was set in Georgian times. It tells the story of Leonie, a girl brought up in a humble home in Paris, but whose origins are anything but humble.

Through a series of interesting events, (and after first masquerading as his page "Leon") Leonie becomes the ward of the Duke of Avon. The mystery of her real parentage lies in the hands of the Duke of Avon's enemy, the deadly Compte de Sainte-Vire, a man Leonie greatly fears.

Published in 1926, the book is very much "of it's time", with a rather melodramatic tone. It seems to be a favorite with members of the Heyer Listserv (book discussion group), and Avon is definitely a favorite hero with the ladies on the list. Justin, Duke of Avon, is amusing, arrogant, self-centered, with a sometimes destructive wit at the beginning of the book. About halfway through we see him maturing a bit; he is kinder, his good characteristics have strengthened, and he actually puts someone else's interests above his own.

Leonie, I have to admit, annoys me at times; she worships Avon with slavish adoration and defends him to all. The man's nickname is "Satanas", for goodness sake! But I still have a kindness for her, and, as I said, he does grow up. This is a Heyer that I do like to re-read once in a while. The characters of Justin's family are so very funny. There is a lot of wit and charm in the book (which one expects of Heyer, after all). I think my favorite character in the whole book is Rupert, the Duke's brother. Rupert makes the book worth reading all on his own.

It is a fast-paced, tension-filled book, which will keepyou laughing throughout -- from the moment Avon first meets Leonie, dressed in boy's clothes and going by the name of "Leon", to the excellent chase and rescue at the end. It is a feel-good read with hilarious dialogue throughout and characters that you can't help but love. And although it is not in my personal top 10, I know some who put it in the #1 spot on their Heyer list. So look for it in your library or buy an inexpensive paperback on Ebay or Amazon. It's worth the read.

My copy of TOS is a Bantam Books paperback, published in 1970. It is one of only a few that I do not yet have in hard cover.

Note: Heyer did not do sequels, but it is generally accepted by "Heyerites" (and stated by Heyer biographer Jane Aiken Hodge) that she did take the main characters in The Black Moth and use them again, under different names, in These Old Shades. She titled the book so, as a hint to her readers -- the characters in TOS were "shades" of those in TBM.

Since TOS was published in 1926, she was probably writing it at the time of her marriage to Ronald Rougier in 1925. It was published during what is known as The General Strike in England when there were not only no trains or newspapers, but no advertising or reviews, either. Yet the book was an instant success. Hodge suggests Heyer may have been encouraged to believe that she didn't need publicity to have a successful novel, after TOS sold 190,000 copies on publication.

My list, so far:

1. Simon The Coldheart

2. These Old Shades

3. Instead of the Thorn

4. Powder and Patch

5. The Black Moth

6. The Great Roxhythe

Tags: Georgette Heyer, These Old Shades, Jane Aiken Hodge

More On Their Personal Lives...

According to Hodge, the Heyer family moved from an address in Woodside to a slightly better address at 11 Homefield Road in Wimbledon in 1918. In 1923 they moved to 5 Ridgeway Place, to a newly built house. It was a four-bedroom house with a secluded garden on what was once the Ernle-Drax estate and was within easy walking distance of Wimbledon Commons. Hodge suggests that it probably had an air of country living about it.

In 1923 George Heyer gave a talk on "History in Fiction" to the select Wimbledon Literary and Scientific Society, and in 1925 he gave a talk on "The Humour of Dickens's Minor Characters". In 1924 the Oxford University Press published his translation of Francois Villon's poems, saying they were proud to handle it. Georgette appeared with her father, playing Prince Arthur to his King John in a literary tableau at the age of 11, for the Literary and Scientific Society which he had been invited to join in 1909.

It is easy to imagine how much his appreciation of her first literary effort in The Black Moth must have meant to Georgette.

Next Entry: These Old Shades

Tags: George Heyer, Georgette Heyer, Jane Aiken Hodge

Autobiographical In Nature

Georgette was so very private, but she reportedly told those who asked that they would find her in her work. A very cryptic remark. Critic and novelist A. S. Byatt wrote a long memorial piece for The Sunday Times when she died, based on interviews with her husband, her good friend, Carola Oman, and two of her publisher friends. That is about the only written source for any information on her early life. Hodge supplemented that info with interviews with her surviving family and friends and some of the letters to which she was given access when she wrote The Private World Of Georgette Heyer, published in 1984.

Heyer's brother, Frank, asserted that the four suppressed contemporary novels (Instead of the Thorn, Helen, Barren Corn, and Pastel) were somewhat autobiographical in nature, in particular Helen. But it is still a guessing game, as far as I can see, as to which parts of the novels were autobiographical.

We have Hodge's work, based on the only written and interview sources available, and we have our own opinions or surmises as to what she was really like and what her life was really like. She will forever remain somewhat of a mystery. I guess it should be that way because she obviously preferred it that way while she was living. But those of us who have had a love affair with her work still crave more.

Next Entry: Simon The Coldheart

Tags: A.S. Byatt, Jane Aiken Hodge

The Personal Lives Of The Heyers...

The following information is taken from THE PRIVATE WORLD OF GEORGETTE HEYER by Jane Aiken Hodge.

Georgette was named after her father, George, who was also named after his father. The senior George Heyer came from Kharkov, Russia in the middle of the nineteenth century, to settle in England where he married an English girl named Alice Waters. He was a fur merchant. There is little known about him or about why he immigrated to England, although it is posited that he may have been a fugitive from the Russian pogroms of that time. Georgette's brother, Frank, remembered him as being bearded, having a strong accent, and being a practical joker.

Their son George was born in Islington in 1869, enlarging their family of three girls, Alice, Ilma, and Inez. George attended King's College School in London, read classics at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and wrote regularly for Cambridge's Granta. In the 1890s he became a teacher at Weymouth College, and later was invited to teach French at King's College School in 1897 when it moved to Wimbledon.

In 1901 he married Sylvia Watkins at the Church of St. Peter in Eltham. She was 25 at the time and the daughter of a Thames tugboat owner. She had been an outstanding student of cello and piano at the Royal College of Music. Georgette was born a year after her parents were married, George Boris four years after that, and Frank Dmitri five years later.

George was well thought of at King's College School where he also discovered a gift for fund raising. In 1903 he gave up teaching and held various other positions including organizing Queen Alexandra's Charity Matinees and acting as Secretary of the Memorial Theatre at Stratford. He also wrote occasionally for Punch.

Boris and Frank both attended Lancing College, with Boris going straight from there to a junior job with Bovril. Frank went on to Cambridge and became a schoolmaster, teaching for twenty-one years at Downside.

Little is known about Heyer's life as a young girl. It is not known where she was educated. She herself said that she was educated at "various day schools", and that she never attended college. At the beginning of the 1914-1918 war she was for a time in Paris where her father was working when the war broke out. Hodge reports that Heyer recalled hearing the German gun, Big Bertha, before they returned to Wimbledon.

At that time she was enrolled for a while at The Study, one of Wimbledon's two main girls' schools, and, according to Hodge, the more socially conscious of the two; but no records of her time there are in existance today.

George Heyer was very active during the war. Even though he was over-age he obtained a captaincy in the Army Service Corps. He was a requistioning officer in France, and was awarded the O.B.E. after the war. At that time he went to work for the War Office as a staff captain, but left, after suffering a severe illness, to become Appeal Secretary at King's College Hospital.

More on their personal lives to follow.

Next Entry: Daring For Its Time

Tags: Georgette Heyer, Punch, Pogroms, Jane Aiken Hodge