Georgette Heyer Read online

  An unusual book, Barren Corn remains a surprisingly empathetic novel which caught the attention of several reviewers in both Britain and America. In it Georgette examines the psychology of an enduring, dedicated love—a love so strong as to be utterly self-sacrificing—albeit for the wrong reasons. And, whether she meant to or not, in telling Laura’s story Georgette demonstrated a deep understanding of aspects of the human psyche and the kinds of mental traps into which individuals can fall when driven by love or sexual desire. She sees the great class divide and explores its bitter consequences for Hugh and Laura after their marriage. Barren Corn is as much about snobbery as it is about the worth of the individual, and the book benefited from the kind of physical and emotional detachment from England which came from living as an expatriate overseas.

  This was to be Georgette’s final contemporary novel. Years after its publication, and despite several reprints, she informed Longmans (they had bought the rights from Hutchinson and republished Instead of the Thorn in 1929) that she wanted each of her four contemporary novels permanently suppressed. Georgette could be a harsh critic of her own work and in later years was unstinting in her condemnation of these early novels, asking Louisa Callender of Heinemann to “forget all about INSTEAD OF THE THORN, PASTEL, HELEN, BARREN CORN. They aren’t thrillers, and they stink, and I want them to be buried in decent oblivion.” She had her wish. The contracts with Longmans were canceled and the books remain out of print to this day.5

  4 The only other memorial to her father is a plaque commissioned by the Board of King’s College Hospital for the hospital chapel. It reads: “In memory of George Heyer MA MBE (Mil). Appeal Secretary. Who entered into rest 16th June 1925. At the age of 56 years.”

  5 In the 1970s due to a loophole in the copyright laws, a small American publishing firm reprinted the novels without permission but ceased production after copyright was reasserted.

  Part III

  A NEW LIFE: THE SUSSEX YEARS

  1930–1942

  10

  I have always considered that one of the more important points between Author & Agent is that each party should understand the other tolerably clearly.

  —Georgette Heyer

  Georgette and Ronald returned to England early in 1930 and in April Longmans published Barren Corn. Having described her heroine as like “a Luini Madonna,” Georgette was appalled by the book’s dust jacket and wrote at once to Moore to protest:

  I never in my life saw a more—well, blood-stained wrapper! It nearly made me sick it up on the mat, so to speak…What malign spirit of inartistry prompted the—so-called—artist to plonk that ghastly, that dire woman on the cover? If he’d contented himself with the mimosa on a black ground it mightn’t have been so bad. As it is—he ought to be put in a pot and boiled.

  Her feelings of antipathy toward Longmans were not enhanced by Willie Longman wandering into their flat one evening to tell her “in his usual rather vapid manner” that there were problems with payments from Australia. After just three books with Longmans Georgette was growing dissatisfied with his handling of her work and “the methods of his blighted firm.” But she remained with the company for another five years.

  Georgette had no new novel for Heinemann in 1930. Instead they published her pseudonymous Mills & Boon novel, The Transformation of Philip Jettan, under the new title of Powder and Patch—this time with her own name on the cover. It may have been Georgette’s suggestion to delete the original final chapter. When she wrote the book in 1923, she was young, single, and relatively naive; seven years later she was married and had experienced life in foreign climes. Jane Aiken Hodge wrote perceptively of the book’s alteration: “In the first version, he wins her and takes her to Paris, to become exquisites together. In the second, they will retire to Sussex and become a country gentleman and his wife, very much like the Rougiers.” By 1930, the emphasis had shifted from romantic extravagance to a practical, comfortable approach to life that more accurately reflected Georgette’s own experience. She may have dreamed of reaching the heights of passion in her youth, but as she grew older her novels increasingly dealt in a quieter reality—still romantic, but more humorous, prosaic, and often far more lasting.

  Back in London the Rougiers took a flat at 62 Stanhope Gardens, South Kensington, where Georgette began her twelfth novel while Ronald decided what to do next. There were limited employment prospects for a mining engineer living in London but he would not take another overseas posting. The return home from Macedonia was largely the result of their decision to start a family. This, Georgette had told Ronald, could happen only if they were settled in England. Although she could be reticent on some topics, there were others about which she could be quite forceful and outspoken: the decision to have a baby was one of them. For Ronald her resolve meant that, unless he was willing to embrace the solitary life of a married man working overseas without his family, he would have to find another occupation. Accordingly, he bought into a partnership in a gas, light, and coke company in the Horseferry Road, but the business did not prosper and he was forced to think of something else. After several months in London, he and Georgette decided to leave the city and settle in the country.

  Many things at home had changed during the years they had spent overseas. Like other western countries, Britain was now in the grip of the Great Depression, with growing unemployment and hardship and privation for those unable to find work. For Georgette there were certain attractions in moving out of London. With a growing literary reputation and with at least two more books in mind, she wanted the sort of privacy that had been an intrinsic part of her life overseas. Africa had been an escape and a hiatus from grief which had given her space and time alone with few demands and a caring, empathetic partner in Ronald. In the wilds of Tanganyika, Georgette had returned to her writing and the deep wound of loss had gradually healed over. And in Macedonia, there had been a comforting distance from the life she had known when her father was alive.

  Back in London there were constant reminders of George which, if they did not reopen her wound, made her all too aware of it. In leaving England, Georgette had willingly left the past behind: she had finished with the early chapters of her life and put them away for good. Carola Oman described how Georgette “could put up complete barriers around certain topics which were then never discussed,” and this is what she did after her return to England from Macedonia. From then on she chose not to discuss her childhood or her father; with few exceptions, she never again made reference to George’s life or death and she shared her personal feelings with only her closest family and friends.

  By October 1930 they had chosen Sussex as the ideal county in which to live. Ronald had been offered a lease on a business in Horsham, a market town about thirty miles south of London. They borrowed money from Georgette’s Aunt Ciss and Aunt Jo (paid back over time with interest) and bought the Russell Hillsdon Sports Store at No. 9 The Bishopric in the center of town. It was a good location, with rooms above the shop where Boris would live after it was decided that he, too, would leave London and help Ronald run the business. They were to move to Sussex in the new year, to allow Georgette time to finish her new novel.

  This latest book was a much more ambitious attempt at recreating the medieval period than Simon the Coldheart. Georgette had decided to retell the story of William the Conqueror from his birth in 1027 to his coronation in Westminster Abbey in 1066. She immersed herself in the sources and once again enlisted Ronald’s aid in the acquisition of useful bits of information—later recording his contribution in one of her characteristic tributes on the flyleaf of his copy: “Here is THE CONQUEROR for Ronald, with acknowledgements for his watchfulness & care in all such matters as Bear-fights, Cavalry-charges, Distances, & Male-Etiquette and with love from George.” They took a holiday to Normandy to see the sites of William’s battles and sieges and to gather material for the book. Fifty years later, Georgette vividly remembered: “What a lot of work I put into it! And how difficult it was
to correlate the various contemporary (and largely inaccurate) accounts of William’s Life and Times.”

  She finished The Conqueror late in 1930. It had not been an easy book to write, and halfway through she had felt a sudden anxiety about it, telling Moore:

  I have finished Part II, 60,000 words perpetrated already. I shall have to cut it a bit, shan’t I? William has now married his Matilda, & I approach what I think is going to be the most difficult part of the five—“The Might of France.” I don’t know what Heinemann will say. Sometimes I think I’ve written a book heavy as lead; at others I don’t think it’s so bad. Carola likes it; Joanna Cannan says it is the most interesting historical novel she has read, but I fear she is partial and prejudiced.

  Apart from Ronald and her mother, Joanna and Carola were Georgette’s main readers and the three women continued to critique each other’s work well into the 1930s. Despite Georgette’s fears of bias, Carola and Joanna were both experienced authors, well able to read a manuscript with a critical, practiced eye. They were neither of them as prolific as Georgette but they had both written consistently since 1923. In 1930 Joanna’s sixth novel No Walls of Jasper came out in the same month as Georgette’s Barren Corn, while Carola’s seventh book Fair Stood the Wind appeared in July. Fair Stood the Wind was a mildly entertaining modern novel and Georgette’s judgment that “the first 100 pages want cutting” proved astute.

  Far more compelling was Joanna’s No Walls of Jasper about a middle-aged married couple disillusioned by the realities of middle-class family life. Joanna dedicated the novel to Georgette, who read it and wrote to Moore to ask rhetorically, “Isn’t her new book Good?” Reading Joanna’s description of the fictional lady writer in the novel, Georgette must have recognized something of herself:

  Cynthia Bechler was a historical novelist; her “cloak and sword” romances were nearer to “best sellers” than anything to be found in the sober general catalogue of Messrs. Curtis, Fayre and Haydon. She was dark; not just brown-haired like Phyl, but strikingly dark, and very tall; fifty years ago she would have been ridiculed as a “maypole,” and considered unmarriageable. She was not beautiful, not pretty; her nose was too large, aquiline yet lacking delicacy, and she had too full a mouth, too heavy a chin. But her eyes were beautiful, almond-shaped, tawny amber-brown, the lower, as well as the upper, lashes prettily curled; and she was admirably soignée…

  While Joanna’s description of her fictional novelist was mostly complimentary, her characters’ take on Cynthia Bechler’s work was less so:

  “I’ve been trying to imagine what it was like in the Middle Ages, but the people won’t come human.”

  Martin reflected. “That’s the fault of these wretched historical novelists—that woman your husband was speaking of—what’s-her-name? They cloak and sword their characters and set them leaping about like Douglas Fairbanks, when they were really only poor mutts making a muddle of things like ourselves. I can’t stand the tripe that woman turns out. She’s got no respect for herself or her public or the past.”

  Georgette does not appear to have taken offense at Joanna’s description, for their friendship remained robust throughout the 1930s. She was aware of the sort of license that novelists sometimes took with people they knew or had met, writing them into their stories—never precisely as they were in real life—but making use of elements of their personalities, characteristics, or mannerisms. It was something Georgette herself had done when she wrote aspects of her mother into Pastel and which she would take great delight in doing with friends, family, and chance-met acquaintances in future novels.

  Georgette liked Joanna’s contemporary books but she admired Carola’s historical novels, of which the last two, Crouchback and Miss Barrett’s Elopement, had been particularly successful. Crouchback was about Richard III, and Jane Mander recorded that Carola had “spent over a year reading contemporary chronicles, and every authority, ancient and modern, on which she could lay hands, before she began it.” It was this approach to the serious historical novel that Georgette herself had used while writing The Conqueror and which had inspired her to dedicate that novel to Carola: “In friendship and in appreciation of her own incomparable work done in the historic manner dear to us both.”

  The doubts Georgette expressed to Moore about The Conqueror were an early sign of her burgeoning need for praise from people she respected. By the time The Conqueror was published in 1931 she had written twelve books in ten years and tried her hand at the contemporary novel, the serious historical, the swashbuckler, and the lighthearted romance of manners and modes. She had been regularly reviewed in the major newspapers in both Britain and America, complimented on her “pretty talent,” her skill at creating amusing characters and situations, and her ability to bring the past to life, and criticized for being old-fashioned, artificial, and glib. She does not seem to have paid too much attention to her reviewers in those early years, choosing instead to follow her literary impulses and write where whim or fancy took her. This was unsurprising given that she had been published “first crack out of the bag” at nineteen, never had a novel rejected, and reliably sold several thousand copies of her books in their first year of publication.

  She was not yet a consistent bestseller, however, and this may have been due in part to her eclectic publishing history. After six years and six novels with Heinemann and three years and three novels with Longmans, Georgette still had not settled to a single style or historical period. Her books varied considerably in terms of their seriousness, comedic elements, and pace of plot. For those readers who had read and loved The Black Moth or These Old Shades, her medieval novels, Simon the Coldheart and The Conqueror made for rather different reading, while her four contemporary books may have been disappointing to anyone expecting the style or humor of Beauvallet or The Masqueraders.

  In that first decade as a writer, Georgette was still learning her craft. She had yet to come to grips with the rhythms and cycles of the publishing industry. It took time to build a reputation and a readership, especially as she had so often changed publishers. Having a publisher she liked was vital to her. After several books with both Longmans and Heinemann she was still not altogether satisfied with either firm’s handling of her work. Despite knowing Willie Longman of Longmans and Charles Evans, the Managing Director of Heinemann, well enough to both criticize and praise them, Georgette did not have the sort of personal relationship which she would have liked with either man. Although she appears never to have consciously acknowledged it, Georgette would always need the presence in her life of a charming, cultured, and educated male (in addition to her husband) whose judgment she respected and who would respond positively to her work. In the years following her father’s death, this role appears to have been filled by her agent, Leonard Moore, to whom she dedicated Helen in 1928.

  The Conqueror came out in March 1931 as Georgette and Ronald were preparing to move to Sussex. They were due to leave London at the end of April and planned to stay at a hotel near Horsham while they looked for a suitable house. But on 18 April, their leave-taking was thrown into disarray when they learned that Ronald’s father had fallen under a train at Down Street tube station and been killed. It was an appalling shock but worse was to come when, three days later, the Coroner, Mr. Oddy, brought in a verdict of suicide while of unsound mind. (Down Street station lay between Green Park and Hyde Park Corner on London’s Piccadilly Line. It was well known for suicides and was permanently closed the following year.) Ronald’s mother was devastated and Georgette and Ronald were united in rejecting the judgment. “No one who knew him believes that he was of unsound mind,” Georgette assured Moore, “but it is a wicked, hateful thing to have said about such a dear, placid, cheery & level-headed man. He was a darling. It is like losing a second father.”

  Charles Joseph Rougier was seventy-one and apparently in good health (though he had made his will exactly one month to the day before the tragedy). He had been a much-loved husband and father and Georgette had
been especially fond of him. She and Ronald were convinced that “from certain indications during the past six months,” his father had suffered a stroke and fallen on to the rails. Whether the closure three months earlier of the Rougier family’s factory in Yorkshire had any bearing on Charles Joseph’s death is unknown. His financial position appears to have been sound, for he died leaving an estate worth £35,000, a very large sum in those days. The money (minus death duties) went entirely to his widow and did nothing to ease Ronald’s financial worries.

  The fortnight following his father’s death was intensely busy for Ronald as he made the funeral arrangements, saw to the will, and prepared to leave for Sussex. Georgette was busy organizing the move but she and Ronald visited his mother as often as they could. Jean Rougier was not an easy person and Georgette had never been good at sympathy. Her mother-in-law had what Frank Heyer described as “an acid, nagging tongue” and she had earned Georgette’s disapproval by her perceived preference for Leslie, Ronald’s elder brother. Leslie and his wife Tam managed Jean better, but as a career officer in the Lancashire Fusiliers Leslie was often away, so that the supportive role frequently fell to Ronald and by extension to Georgette. She was glad to be leaving London and had great hopes of their new life in the Sussex countryside.