Georgette Heyer
If anything good can be said to have come out of the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns of 2020, it is that it seems people once again turned to reading as a past-time. Grown women fell back on what surely was a childhood comfort and began to make a big noise about Georgette Heyer (1902-1974), a prolific English historical novelist (17th-18th cent.), who always had a loyal following among women, who arguably created the Regency romance genre, and who remained virtually unknown amongst males until, possibly, the present day. But the tide has turned; by 2022, Vox had headlined her ("When will Hollywood discover Georgette Heyer?"), public libraries finally noticed that her books were not only still in circulation but often had a waitlist, and there is even a Georgette Heyer podcase.