Georgette Heyer was best known for her Regency romance and detective fiction novels. Heyer is commemorated by a blue plaque at 103 Woodside, Wimbledon, where she was born.

Georgette Heyer was born at 103 Woodside, Wimbledon, on 16 August 1902. Her family were probably the first occupants of the red brick end-of-terrace house, and it remains largely unaltered. The Heyers later moved around the Wimbledon area, briefly going to Paris – where her teacher father had landed a job in banking – before returning on the outbreak of the First World War.

The family name was pronounced ‘higher’ until the war, when they altered it to ‘hare’ to avoid any hint of Germanic origins, though Georgette’s paternal grandfather was in fact a Russian-Jewish immigrant.

Heyer was educated and took her first steps as a writer in Wimbledon. In 1920, at the age of just 18, she landed a publishing contract for The Black Moth (1921), an epic tale of an 18th-century highwayman, based on a story she made up to entertain her haemophiliac brother Boris. The same year, she met Ronald Rougier, whom she married in 1925 and whose support was important to her work. Her novels Pastel (1929) and Behold, Here’s Poison (1936) were set in a fictionalised version of Wimbledon.

Stephen Fry unveiled the blue plaque at Heyer’s birthplace in Wimbledon in 2015. A fan of her novels since his school days, Fry described Heyer as ‘a fabulous, witty writer who captured the life and language of Regency England superbly’.

Historical fiction

The success of her first book was not matched by the four novels that immediately followed it but Heyer found her stride with a historical romance, These Old Shades, in 1926. Novels set in the Regency period (1811–1820) – influenced by Jane Austen and Samuel Johnson – became her main stock in trade. Standout successes included Devil’s Cub (1932), The Spanish Bride (1940) and Friday’s Child (1944).

Heyer’s books were and remain popular for their witty and entertaining plots, strong characters, credible dialogue and meticulous historical research, notably on the finer points of costume and language. She is distinguished from other prolific and popular authors of romantic fiction by the efforts she put into researching the historical backgrounds for her books. Her description of the Battle of Waterloo in An Infamous Army (1937) was reportedly commended to recruits at Sandhurst. Heyer could, however, be notably self-critical: of Friday’s Child (1943) she said she ‘ought to be shot for writing such nonsense, but it’s unquestionably good escapist literature’.

Crime and return to romance

In 1932 Heyer’s first thriller, Footsteps in the Dark, was published. Some of her other notable works in the crime genre included Death in the Stocks (1935) and the Cornwall-set Penhallow (1942). Penhallow featured a disreputable cast of characters and the memorable opening line, ‘Jimmy the Bastard was cleaning boots…’ and it enabled her to break with her highly conservative publishers, Hodder.

Heyer was notably averse to personal publicity or the adaptation of her novels; she once described herself as ‘selfish, capricious, extravagant and fatally discontented’. She was apt to vent opinions that many – then as well as now – would regard as snobbish and racist. Her own Jewish ancestry notwithstanding, some recent critics have pointed to anti-Semitic tropes in her work.

Heyer’s enduring popularity as a writer, however, is clear. After the Second World War she confined herself to historical romances, and – fuelled by gin, stimulant drugs and cork-tipped cigarettes – produced novels at a rate of almost one a year. At the peak of her popularity, an initial print run of 60,000 would sell out within a month. A Civil Contract (1961) was considered Heyer’s best book by many and by the 1970s she had sold an estimated 20 million books.

Further reading

• Kenneth Womack, ‘Heyer [married name Rougier], Georgette (1902–1974)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) (access with a UK public library card)
• Jennifer Kloester, Georgette Heyer: Biography of a Bestseller (London, 2011)
• Jane Aiken Hodge, The Private World of Georgette Heyer (London, 1984)