Georgette Heyer

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Standard Name: Heyer, Georgette
Birth Name: Georgette Heyer
Married Name: Georgette Rougier
Pseudonym: Stella Martin
GH was prolific in historical, mostly Regency, romances. She also wrote modern novels (which, however, she later suppressed as unsatisfactory to her), essays, and short stories, and published eleven detective novels written in collaboration with her husband. She published nearly sixty books in fifty years (a book a year from the beginning of her career and two a year between 1934 and 1941), and was translated into ten languages.
Dixon, Jay. An Appreciation of Georgette Heyer. http://www.historicalnovelsociety.org/solander%20files/dixon.htm.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
191
One of her novels, The Reluctant Widow, was turned into a film, and several others into stage plays. The romances, whose suspense and emotional intensity have held the attention of so many readers, do not have an entirely simple relationship with traditional gender roles. Heyer heroines tend to diverge fairly widely from the romance stereotype (often they are tomboyish or outstandingly capable), and find their eventual fulfilment in union with an equally not-quite-stereotypical hero.
Black-and-white close-up photo of Georgette Heyer. Looking down, she wears a beaded necklace and her hair is bobbed.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Dedications Joanna Cannan
JC dedicated her novel No Walls of Jasper to the popular novelist Georgette Heyer , who was a personal friend.
TLS Centenary Archive Centenary Archive [1902-2012]. http://www.gale.com/c/the-times-literary-supplement-historical-archive.
1474 (1 May 1930): 368
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
Education Michèle Roberts
As a child, says MR , she lived much of the time in my imagination and in books. The bookcase her mother had had as a student, the local public library, and the local church...
Education Meiling Jin
She was saved by the public Children's Library. She read omnivorously, beginning with the Dr Doolittle books (Hugh Lofting ) and fairy stories but missing out on Enid Blyton (who was kept locked away)...
Education Bryony Lavery
BL claims that at school she was taught Beginner's Reality, Intermediate Boundaries and Advanced Narrow Thinking.
qtd. in
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
She also swott[ed] for Latin, English and History A-levels, while periodically bunking off to read Georgette Heyer and Daphne du Maurier
Education A. S. Byatt
She was educated at Sheffield High School and, from 1949, at the Mount School in York, a Quaker boarding school where her mother had taught English. ASB felt awkward, anxious, and socially isolated at...
Education Fay Weldon
FW learned to read at three: I remember . . . the way the letters suddenly made sense.
Weldon, Fay. Auto da Fay. Flamingo, 2002.
24
After her grandmother joined the family in 1942 she was able to borrow adult books from...
Friends, Associates Joanna Cannan
JC formed early friendships with two other aspiring writers who later achieved success: Carola Oman , with whom she was at school, and Georgette Heyer , who lived (as she did after the war) in Wimbledon.
Intertextuality and Influence Michèle Roberts
It was written at the suggestion of her (male) French publisher, and seen by its author as homage to her once admired Georgette Heyer .
Newman, Jenny. “Michèle Roberts”. Contemporary British and Irish Fiction, edited by Sharon Monteith et al., Arnold, 2004, pp. 119-34.
130, 132
Intertextuality and Influence Bryony Lavery
Her Aching Heart, with music by Juliet Hill , can be described either as parodying historical romance by taking the literary territory of, say, Georgette Heyer and making its love-interest lesbian—or as parodying the...
Intertextuality and Influence J. K. Rowling
Robert Galbraith has his own website, which details his military background and his work first for the military police and then in private security. He says his flamboyant, unusual mother came from Cornwall and went...
Leisure and Society Carola Oman
In a letter to the Times in 1962, CO described a bookcase in her writing-room which held the works she described as All the Winners. For a writer of fairly conservative views and strong...
Literary responses Barbara Cartland
A rival writer of historical romances, Georgette Heyer , once thought seriously of taking BC to court after she discovered that several Cartland novels contained characters, plot elements, and even words lifted from books by...
Literary responses Ethel M. Dell
In response to a compliment on her writing EMD replied, they are not well written and will never be called classics.
qtd. in
Dell, Penelope. Nettie and Sissie. Hamish Hamilton, 1977.
129
Highbrow journals at her death were careful not to praise. The Times Literary...
Reception Norah Lofts
The Day of the Butterfly (1979), one of the last novels published during NL 's lifetime, won the Georgette Heyer Award for historical fiction.
Textual Features Mrs Alexander
MA has therefore been seen as a New Woman novelist on the one hand and on the other as exemplifying the tenets of Victorian conduct writers such as Sarah Stickney Ellis .Her earlier fiction perhaps...

Timeline

6 July 1685: The Duke of Monmouth's Rebellion, aimed at...

National or international item

6 July 1685

The Duke of Monmouth 's Rebellion, aimed at getting possession of the throne, ended in defeat at Sedgemoor in Somerset, with much loss of life.
Grun, Bernard. The Timetables of History. 3rd revised, Simon and Schuster, 1991.
312

18 June 1815: Napoleon's power was decisively crushed at...

National or international item

18 June 1815

Napoleon 's power was decisively crushed at the battle of Waterloo, not far from Brussels.
Chisholm, Hugh, editor. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Eleventh, Cambridge University Press, 1911.
28: 379, 381

Texts

Heyer, Georgette. April Lady. Heinemann; Putnam, 1957.
Heyer, Georgette. Barren Corn. Longmans, Green, 1930.
Heyer, Georgette. Bath Tangle. Heinemann; Putnam, 1955.
Heyer, Georgette. Cotillion. Heinemann; Putnam, 1953.
Heyer, Georgette. Death in the Stocks. Longmans, Green; Doubleday, 1935.
Heyer, Georgette. Detection Unlimited. Heinemann, 1953.
Heyer, Georgette. Duplicate Death. Heinemann, 1951.
Heyer, Georgette. Footsteps in the Dark. Longmans, Green, 1932.
Heyer, Georgette. Friday’s Child. W. Heinemann, 1944.
Heyer, Georgette. Helen. Longmans, Green, 1928.
Heyer, Georgette. Instead of the Thorn. Hutchinson, 1923.
Heyer, Georgette. Lady of Quality. Bodley Head; E. P. Dutton, 1972.
Heyer, Georgette. My Lord John. Bodley Head; Dutton, 1975.
Heyer, Georgette. Pastel. Longmans, Green, 1929.
Heyer, Georgette. Pistols for Two, and Other Stories. Heinemann, 1960.
Heyer, Georgette. Regency Buck. W. Heinemann, 1935.
Heyer, Georgette. Simon the Coldheart. Heinemann; Small, Maynard, 1925.
Heyer, Georgette. Sprig Muslin. Heinemann; Putnam, 1956.
Heyer, Georgette. The Black Moth. Constable, 1921.
Heyer, Georgette. “The Black Moth, 1921”. A Celebration of Women Writers, edited by Mary Mark Ockerbloom.
Heyer, Georgette. The Corinthian. W. Heinemann, 1940.
Heyer, Georgette. The Foundling. Heinemann; Putnam, 1948.
Heyer, Georgette. The Grand Sophy. Heinemann; Putnam, 1950.
Heyer, Georgette. The Spanish Bride. Heinemann; Doubleday, Doran, 1940.
Heyer, Georgette. The Toll-Gate. Heinemann; Putnam, 1954.