It’s probably true that you learn something new every day; on
Tuesday for example I learnt that Georgette Heyer wrote through the night
fuelled by Gin and Dexedrine (Radio 4, Woman’s hour). I’m currently fuelled by
cocoa and gingerbread and have wanted to be in my bed since ten to eight.
I found Georgette Heyer’s books through an English teacher
when I was thirteen; she lent me ‘These Old Shades’ and I never looked back.
(At the time I was a little bit obsessed with ‘The Scarlett Pimpernel’ and it’s
a mercy that someone did steer me towards other books.) It never occurred to me
back then that Heyer might be considered second rate, I loved her books – most of
which I’ve read many times, they saw me through my teens and have been a
comfort ever since. I’ve never accepted that Heyer should be a guilty pleasure;
her writing is simply a pleasure but somehow she does seem to rile people.
Carmen Callil apparently said “she just used ‘Jane Eyre’ and jiggled it around
57 times”, this is unfair partly because Heyer is clearly re-jiggling Austen and
partly because poor girl meets rich (married) man wasn’t a new story when
Charlotte Bronte hit on it, it’s also typical of the mean spirited comments
Heyer attracts.
I don’t know what she was like as a woman, I’m curious to
read Jennifer Kloester’s ‘Georgette Heyer – Biography of a Bestseller’
published a week ago, the reason for the Woman’s hour segment, and the subject
of a very negative review in ‘The Guardian’. Listening to Kloester she’s
clearly as protective of Heyer as I sometimes feel. I don’t often read
biographies (or non-fiction) and can’t afford to be buying new books at the
moment (which in practice so often means instead of spending £20 on one book somehow
spending much more on half a dozen) but this one is tempting.
The Guardian piece is odd – Rachel Cooke apparently liked
Heyer’s books but rips into the woman behind them describing her as sour,
snooty, cynical, snobbish, rapacious when it came to money, and mean spirited
towards other writers. Heyer’s son the late Sir Richard Rougier. also comes in
for a swipe, reminding us that he’s the judge who claimed not to know what a
bouncy castle was (which I’m okay with, middle aged men should probably avoid
bouncy castles anyway. He’s also the judge who said that “fashion conscious
women should be able to dress attractively and even provocatively without
falling prey to sex attackers” which seems more to the point and entirely
laudable.)
It seems that the teenage Heyer was wrong for disliking Freudians,
bohemians, and studio parties. Wrong for conducting her own contractual
negotiations for ‘The Black Moth’, wrong for being the main breadwinner in the
household whilst her husband retrained as a barrister, wrong indeed for caring
about the money she made from her work, but these are all things I find
admirable. I hope that Koestler’s biography is a success and meets with rather
more favourable reviews along the way – there is self interest in this; there
are half a dozen out of print novels, Heyer suppressed them in her life time,
most of them are contemporary rather than historical fiction and I would love
to read them – enough interest and maybe someone will dig them out and dust
them off for a re-issue?
