Georgette Heyer Read online

  From Jinja they caught the lake steamer, Nyanza, to the small Tanganyikan town of Bukoba on the western shore. This was their last stop before the final plunge toward Kyerwa and the compound that would be Georgette’s new home. They traveled there by lorry, mostly following the rhinoceros paths through the grasslands or the occasional bumpy dirt track through the bush. It was eighty miles from Bukoba to Kyerwa as the crow flies, but closer to one-hundred-and-fifty miles by lorry and Georgette experienced firsthand the exigencies of travel and the realities of a rough road. She may not have been traveling in a stagecoach-and-four but the small, narrow-wheeled truck buffeted and bruised its occupants as surely as any nineteenth-century stagecoach.

  It is unlikely that anything could have prepared Georgette for her new home, as a greater contrast between it and her homes in Wimbledon and South Kensington could hardly have been imagined. Kyerwa was not only incredibly remote, it was also utterly different from anything she had ever known. Her house was a hut made of elephant grass. The local people used its bamboo-like stems to make the walls, tying them together with rope made from bark fibers. The roof was made from thick layers of dried elephant-grass leaves laid across narrow wooden rafters to overhang the sides of the hut as a kind of verandah. For a hut it was surprisingly roomy, with two doorways beneath the verandah roof leading into an area for sleeping and another for eating, where Georgette could also work during the day. With characteristic good humor she christened her new home “the Manor House” and soon grew used to its earthen floor and rudimentary facilities. Theirs was one of a handful of huts in a small compound surrounded by a tall, elephant-grass fence—their only protection against the lions, leopards, and rhinos which roamed the plains outside.

  The view from Georgette’s front door was of bare earth and straggly grasslands with an occasional tree in the middle distance and hills on the far horizon. The compound was staffed by local men, mostly from the Haya tribe, none of whom had ever seen a white woman before. Apart from Georgette and Ronald, there was only one other European living in the compound—a “rough, Cornish miner” also prospecting for tin. As the only white woman for one-hundred-and-fifty miles and with Ronald away a good deal of the time, Georgette often found herself living a solitary life. She does not appear to have minded and, despite the isolation, the rough living, and sparse conditions, seems to have been determined to adapt and give Ronald her full support.

  There was a kind of freedom in living so far from civilization and a certain pleasure in making do with no one to judge her or question her behavior. Photographs taken of Georgette in Tanganyika show her wholly at ease, without makeup or accoutrements of any kind. This was the simple life at its most authentic, where the building of a new pantry out of logs and elephant grass was an event worth recording and the incursion of a rhinoceros into the compound at dawn exciting enough to make her leap out of bed and throw “a coat over my pajamas” before rushing out to see the intruder. In her little bit of Africa Georgette wore comfortable clothes, went for long walks, put up with all sorts of inconveniences, wrote her books, cheerfully accompanied Ronald on a twelve-day safari, and relaxed in a way that she probably never did again.

  Georgette had a capacity to be completely self-contained and was content to be left alone. Her imagination was a constant source of creativity and entertainment and there was always her writing. She wrote regular letters home and got on with Helen, the modern novel she had mentioned to Moore in 1925. It was not one of her best books but Helen became an important outlet for her grief by allowing Georgette to write her own private memorial to her father.4 Ironically, when the novel came out in 1928 some of the reviewers criticized Georgette for having the father die so suddenly in the novel, with one calling it a “cheap and easy device.” Understandably ignorant of Georgette’s own tragedy, they missed much of what the novel was really about. Her brother Frank always said that Helen was Georgette’s most autobiographical novel, and it seems also to have been her most cathartic.

  Happily settled in Africa, Georgette began making plans for her first historical romance since her father’s death. It was to be another high-spirited adventure story in which disguise played an integral part in the plot. She wrote The Masqueraders on her lap in the hut in Kyerwa, drawing on her prodigious memory for details of costume and eighteenth-century ephemera when her small library failed to give her what she needed. It must have given her pleasure and some amusement to describe the powdered wigs, splendid jewels, silk patches, dancing, dueling, and elegant evenings spent among the ton while sitting in a grass hut in a remote corner of Tanganyika. Georgette clothed her heroine in perfectly cut velvet suits with gold trim and Mechlin lace and her brother, Robin, in gowns of pale blue taffety and rose pink satin, while she herself was dressed in plain khaki shorts and shirts. The Masqueraders is the only one of her novels in which it is raining in the opening scene and she probably enjoyed recalling the cold dampness of a rainy evening in England while writing in the equatorial heat of Africa.

  Georgette spent more than a year in Africa before she and Ronald decided to try their luck elsewhere. Although he had enjoyed some success in his prospecting venture, Ronald had not found the really big strike needed for a substantial profit and early in 1928 they prepared to go home. Georgette had enjoyed many aspects of life in Kyerwa but she missed England and would not be sorry to return. They left Mombasa early in April and sailed to Zanzibar where they spent a day exploring the old city before sailing on to Port Elizabeth and Cape Town. From there they sailed on the S.S. Usaramo up the west coast of Africa, arriving back in London one week after the April publication of Helen—Georgette’s first novel with Longmans. She now had two publishers: Heinemann, who would continue publishing her historical fiction, and Longmans, who had (for reasons unknown) taken over publishing her contemporary fiction from Hutchinson.

  She was not destined to remain in England for long. Ronald had secured a position with the Kratovo Venture Selection Trust Ltd. and by the time The Masqueraders came out on 30 August, he had gone to Macedonia and the lead mines near the Bulgarian border. Georgette sent an advance copy of The Masqueraders to him in Kratovo in September and days later received a telegram which read: “Congratitations. Find Mahineroders excellent” [sic]. She was due to join him in Macedonia in December but before she left England Georgette finished writing Pastel.

  This third contemporary novel continued the theme of a young woman who must learn to know herself and the differences between one’s romantic dreams and life’s realities. It was a tale of two sisters living in a thinly disguised version of Wimbledon in the 1920s: Frances, the heroine and the elder of the two, is “pastel”—fair, sincere, and a little dull, while the younger sister, Evelyn, is dark, vibrant, and always the favorite. It is Evelyn who, unaware of her sister’s feelings, marries the man with whom Frances has fallen in love. Later, Frances gives up her ideal of an ardent, romantic love and marries steady, stolid, athletic Norman (Frank Heyer later identified him as Ronald): “He was not Romance, but he was her husband, and she did care for him. If she was not passionate that was the fault of her temperament. She thought of the man who might have meant Romance, and awaked passion obtruded for an instant. She banished it swiftly.”

  Pastel appears to have been more of an outlet for Georgette’s personal preoccupations than a riveting, plot-driven story. It is a plain, thoughtful book which is interesting mainly for its autobiographical elements and account of middle-class life in 1920s England. One striking feature is the conversations in which the book’s characters discuss relationships, marriage, the New Age, and the place of women in it. Georgette has her characters say things like “you all fall into the error of comparing the cleverest women with the dullest men” or “if you take your greatest woman doctor and your greatest man doctor you’ll admit the man wins in a walk,” before giving the last word in the conversation to the book’s aristocratic matriarch, who concludes: “‘So silly to vie with men when our minds are so different. Positivel
y a confession of inferiority. Why not stick to our own kind of mind instead of pandering to man’s conceit by trying to acquire his? Ridiculous! Who wants to be like a man? So detached and tabulated! One thing at a time, which is very dull and sensible and successful.’”

  Georgette was clearly interested in the contrasts between the sexes and Pastel appears to reflect many of her own marital experiences. The novel was also influenced by her reading of Rudyard Kipling’s short story “The Enemies to Each Other”—a retelling of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. She and Ronald were great admirers of Kipling, and his final scene where Adam and Eve laughingly recognize their mingled love and animosity for each other is echoed at the end of Pastel when Frances concludes that “Life was bound up with Norman, whom she loved and whom she hated; who was so dear yet so exasperating; with whom she quarrelled and to whom she clung.”

  Georgette dedicated Pastel to her mother and sent Sylvia a copy of the book from Macedonia with a tantalizing inscription: “Here is a book for Mummy, which is sent with love and the hope that She will like it. Some of it she may disagree with; some of it is designed to make her laugh; but whether she laughs or whether she frowns, this book should, on the whole, please her since it contains so much that is Really and Truly her.” (Georgette often capitalized words and phrases to express irony, for emphasis, or to make a humorous point.)

  If Sylvia is the mother in the book then Georgette depicted her as a kind, sensible woman who loves her husband, is affectionate and caring with her children, but who has a prosaic, pragmatic approach to love and relationships. The fictional mother, Mrs. Stornaway, tells love-struck Frances that she hasn’t “much faith in the lasting qualities of a grand passion” and that it is often “the dull things [that] turn out to be the most satisfactory.” Neither statement makes her daughter feel any better about her own turbulent emotions. Toward the end of the book, Mrs. Stornaway says of Frances that “I used to think she was very like me, but she isn’t. I don’t always understand her.” Perhaps Sylvia, too, had finally realized that her daughter’s hopes and dreams were not the same as her own.

  Georgette had followed in her father’s footsteps and not her mother’s. This might not have been an issue if Sylvia had approved wholeheartedly of her daughter’s writing, but it was to be some years before her mother expressed pride in Georgette’s literary achievements. There must have been a degree of disappointment in the realization for the gifted mother that she had produced a gifted daughter, but with a taste for literature rather than music. But there were stronger feelings too, because according to Frank Heyer, Sylvia’s disapproval of her daughter’s writing sprang from feelings of resentment and even envy that Georgette had succeeded in using her talent while her mother had not.

  Soon after finishing Pastel, Georgette left London for Macedonia. Before her departure she was “interviewed” by the New Zealand writer Jane Mander who had come to know Georgette, Carola, and Joanna through her job at Christy & Moore. During the 1920s she had developed a relationship with the three young women which, in 1933 prompted her to describe them as “my own authors, since I read and advised on their early manuscripts before they were as well known as they are now.” Jane Mander was herself a published author who supplemented her small income by reading manuscripts for Christy & Moore and writing articles for the New Zealand Sun newspaper which touted her as one of their regular “London Correspondents.” It was in her Sun article “Two Clever Women Writers: The Work of Georgette Heyer and Carola Oman” that she recorded Georgette’s description of herself as “a sheltered daughter” and someone who disliked “Bohemians and studio parties.” Jane Mander also offered a rare glimpse into Georgette’s childhood, describing her as “an infant prodigy” who “started to write as a child” and that it was her “love of history [that] turned her writing ability to by-gone days.”

  Although Jane Mander and Georgette certainly talked together it is not clear whether the New Zealander ever actually interviewed Georgette in a formal sense or whether she simply remembered things from their conversations and wove them into an article for the Sun after Georgette had left for Macedonia. A few years later, in January 1933, Jane Mander wrote a piece for the New Zealand Mirror entitled “Women Writers I Have Known” in which she discussed each of Georgette’s, Joanna’s, and Carola’s personalities, lifestyles, and literary achievements. Here she was pleased to inform her readers that, Georgette’s “sales mount steadily, and in Australia have reached the surprising figure of over ten thousand. But all this success had not spoiled Georgette Heyer. She is easily one of the most charming writers I know.”

  There is no record of what Georgette thought of Jane Mander (although she disagreed with her criticism of Carola’s 1931 novel Fair Stood the Wind). It is possible that Jane Pilbury, the governess in Helen, whom Georgette described as “very shy and brusque” and “something like Queen Elizabeth [I] as regards face and hair” may have been based on Jane Mander, with her red hair, patrician looks, shyness, and honest, brusque manner. By the time Jane Mander’s first article appeared in New Zealand, Georgette was well-established in her new home in Macedonia; the piece never appeared in the British press and it is doubtful if she ever knew of its existence.

  Georgette traveled out to Macedonia by train, reaching Kratovo in a few days. Her new home was an old Turkish house in a small village with a water supply originally constructed by the Romans. Kratovo had long been a source of precious metals and when Georgette visited the mines she could still see the centuries-old names of slaves carved into the rock. As in Africa, she adjusted to her new life without complaint and got on with writing her next historical novel for Heinemann.

  Beauvallet was to be a swashbuckling adventure story set in the time of Elizabeth I with a hero (Sir Nicholas Beauvallet) whose courage, daring, and skill with a sword was undoubtedly inspired by characters such as Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel and Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood. Georgette also drew on her own earlier work by making Beauvallet a direct descendant of the hero in Simon the Coldheart. Ronald took a keen interest in her writing and she enlisted his help as a researcher. After their marriage he was always her first reader and critic. She valued his opinions and admired his knowledge of history and his ability to hunt up elusive facts or bits of “period color” which she could use. She eventually inscribed his copy of Beauvallet: “‘To Wonaldy-pet, Our joint effort’” signing herself “George”—a name reserved for use by only her closest friends and relatives.

  Georgette wrote her first article in Macedonia. Entitled “The Horned Beast of Africa” it appeared in The Sphere in June 1929—the only time she wrote about her experiences in Tanganyika. The article was mainly about the rhinoceroses she and Ronald had encountered in Kyerwa and how Ronald had narrowly escaped death while shooting an old bull rhino. Georgette rarely wrote about her overseas experiences. She found little fodder for her fiction in the years spent in Africa and Eastern Europe. She did weave the ghostly footsteps she and Ronald sometimes heard in their house in Kratovo into her first detective-thriller and a later mystery would feature a character who spoke Serbian. But personal adventures—such as the time she nearly died in the local dentist’s chair in Kratovo after the anesthetist failed to notice a blockage in the gas-line and her face turned blue, or the night the owner of the Kratovo cinema invited the whole town to watch him burn the theater down in order to collect the insurance money—she did not consider good story material.

  When not writing Georgette spent her days reading, taking walks, horseback riding with Ronald, or visiting the capital Skopje. There was a small community of “Britishers” there who would invite one another to dinners and cocktail parties and often get together for drinks at the only bar in town. David Footman, the British Consul in Skopje, became a friend. He later wrote a book of short stories about his time in the Balkans. Heinemann published Halfway East in 1935 and in a letter to her childhood friend, John Hayward, Georgette described the stories as “very go
od.” Reading them it is tempting to think that Footman’s depiction of one of the English wives was based on his memory of Georgette:

  Lorna Coote was thirty-three. She was tallish and slender, with blue eyes and dark brown hair. When you saw her in evening dress you thought she was rather pretty. Some people thought she was rather highbrow, and complained that she didn’t have much to say for herself. That was because she generally refused a second cocktail and never seemed much at home among the noisy and drunken parties we sometimes used to have. She did not like crowds. She was always charming to everybody, and if she was ever nervy or depressed or bad-tempered she did not show it. She was fond of music and read a good deal. She used to have a lot of books sent out from England.

  Georgette had rejoined the London Library after her return from Africa in 1928 and she also had books sent out to her from England.

  She finished Beauvallet in Macedonia and posted the manuscript to Heinemann, who paid her £200 against royalties and published it in September 1929. The fourfold increase in the advance (she had received a £50 advance for Simon the Coldheart and for The Masqueraders) was indicative of her steadily increasing sales. Georgette sent one of her advance copies to her mother in England with a word of warning on the flyleaf: “Darling Mummy with love from Dordette. A book she must be prepared to dislike!” Her inscriptions to Sylvia were often frank and humorous and they shed a little light on Georgette’s sense of her mother and her need for her approval. In the first decade of her writing life she cared a good deal about Sylvia’s opinion of her books. It was only later that she became intolerant of her mother’s preference for certain kinds of her novels and often dismissive of her views.

  Georgette was still in Macedonia when she began a new contemporary romance for Longmans entitled Barren Corn. It centered on a mismatched love affair between Laura Burton, an intelligent, lowermiddle-class woman from Brixton, and Hugh Salinger, a handsome, selfish member of the upper class, who meet on the French Riviera one summer after the War. In it Georgette gave voice to some of her thoughts about sex, religious beliefs, and life after death. Her most ambitious and compelling contemporary romance, it was also the only one of her novels to deal directly with the issue of class in English society. From the outset Laura sees the class difference between herself and Hugh as insurmountable, whereas Hugh decides that he can change her so that even his mother will “forget the accident of her birth.”