BOOK REVIEW: Georgette Heyer by Jennifer Kloester

I’ve been slipping biographies of writers into my reading list, most recently George Eliot (The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life by Clare Carlisle) and John Donne (Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell.) This time, I turned my attention to the Queen of Regency Romance, Georgette Heyer, one of my favorite authors. (Heyer was born in 1902 and died in 1974.)

Georgette Heyer by Jennifer Kloester is a meticulously researched biography of this talented and fiercely private writer. Like many comprehensive biographies, the book begins even before her birth, with an overview of her parents and grandparents. We learn about her early life, particularly the influence of her father. For my part, I found the childhood portion of the book to be a little too detailed and lengthy. It was slow going at first, but grew more interesting when Georgette reached adulthood and her writing took off.

And take off it did. From her very first published work, The Black Moth, written while she was still a teenager, Heyer found an eager audience. However, it took a long while for her to settle in to writing what she wrote best. She wanted to be taken seriously, and to write big books. (She did write a few non-Romance historical novels.) Moreover, she wrote constantly to keep the wolf from her door. She could turn out short stories with ease. And she wrote a slew of detective novels (contemporary at the time, but that now also read as historical.) These all sold well, but her romances were what her fans clamored for most. It is said that she essentially invented the Regency Romance genre.

The biography focuses a good deal on Heyer’s worries over money. After her father died, she was financially responsible for her widowed mother and, for a long time, her two younger brothers. She also supported her husband until he got his legal career off the ground. They had one son, and during his childhood, Georgette was primary (and at times, only) breadwinner. And yet, the biography makes clear that it wasn’t that her income was insufficient, but rather that she and her husband spent themselves into a financial hole and had a hard time climbing out. This was good news for her fans, since it spurred her to write romance after romance.

It was interesting to see the life circumstances surrounding each of Heyer’s novels. She lived through both World Wars. Family members fought in WWII, a great source of anxiety. There was also a paper shortage. Rationing meant limiting the number of books that could be released and printing them smaller. (Heyer’s books got top priority because they sold so well.)

The biography quotes many of her letters and some of the responses. We peer into her relationships with her agents and publishers. It isn’t always pretty. She was rather thin-skinned, and the impression I got from the book was that she tended to drop people when they were no longer useful to her. She was also a product of her time and her upbringing, which meant she was a bit of a snob and a bigot. We want better from our idols, but they are human. And Kloester’s biography does a great job of revealing Georgette Heyer, warts and all.