In Love with Georgette Heyer

I was first introduced to the books of Georgette Heyer in my early teens when a teacher read ‘Friday’s Child’ to us.

Over the decades I have read all of her books – Regency and Mystery – several times. I suspect that every teenaged girl read the Regency novels as romances. But after reading them when a bit older you realise that they are a brilliant insight into High Society in that period. Whenever you read them a second – or more – times you begin to see how witty (in some cases – hilarious) they are.

Georgette Heyer researched everything about that period – clothes, food, transport, manners, speech. She became an expert on the period and was a bloody good writer.

In the 1960s I was working for a mining magazine and it turned out that one ‘elderly’ gentleman there had been a mining engineer and was friends with Georgette Heyer’s husband – who had also been a mining engineer. When I told him how much I admired the writer’s work he said he would introduce me. Unfortunately he died before that could happen.

Thanks to Amazon Kindle I am now beginning my own collection of Georgette Heyer books.

Incidentally, Joan Aiken Hodge wrote a superb biography of Georgette Heyer entitled ‘The Private World of Georgette Heyer'. Paperback available on Amazon.