Georgette Heyer

If anything good can be said to have resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, it is that people once again turned to reading as a past-time, and grown women, falling back on what surely had been a teenage comfort, began to make a big noise about Georgette Heyer (1902-1974). Heyer was a prolific English historical novelist (targeting mainly the English Regency period, 1811-1820), who always had a loyal following among women, who arguably created the Regency romance genre exploited by dozens of lesser later writers, and whose works quietly flew under the radar for decades after her death. She gave no interviews during her lifetime and seldom came to the attention of the Literati of her time, although at least one of her books, The Foundling, was reviewed in 1948 by the New York Times, which stated, "Miss Heyer writes cheerful and highly unorthodox historical novels about Regency England, in which people never lose their lives, their virtue or even their tempers". But the tide has turned; by 2022, Vox had headlined her ("When will Hollywood discover Georgette Heyer?"), public libraries finally noticed that her books are not only still in circulation but often have a waitlist, and there is even a Georgette Heyer podcast.

Inspired by the social setting of the Jane Austen novels, Heyer wrote more than two dozen historial "romances", mostly set in England's Regency period (18?? to 18??), and a few ever earlier. The predictable social rules of Heyer's fictional world, mostly set in England's Regency period (18?? to 18??), provide a stable backdrop for her wildly inventive tangles of household and familial relationships. Each Regency novel has a female lead and a male lead who, sooner or later, marry and at some point are lucky enough to develop mutual respect and affection. Each book is filled with colorful language, cant spoken by someone in the lower classes, and descriptions of clothing and cultural pursuits specific to the period. But beyond that, each story is entirely unique and the best ones detail a complex plot, often about relatives struggling to control children and children struggling for independence, which still resonates with anyone today.

Heyer's stylized language, which she meticulously collected and gleaned from historical artifacts of the Regency period, have been widely copied by other writers. No doubt many women recognized the irony that the Bridgerton books by Julia Quinn, made into a TV series by Netflix, are entirely standing on the shoulders of Georgette Heyer's body of work.

Later in her career, she began writing detective stories as well.