Georgette Heyer: isn't it a pity

Jennifer Kloester, Georgette Heyer.

 

Never read biographies of your favorite writers. Jennifer Kloester builds on the research Jane Aiken Hodge did for her Heyer biography; Kloester has the great advantage of full cooperation from the Heyer family, and complete access to Heyer's letters. The book is well-written and enlightening. Kloester has done substantial original research, including scanning British periodicals page-by-page to track down forgotten Heyer short stories. Kloester tends to gloss over, or at least excuse, Heyer's prejudices and crankiness, but she scrupulously presents the evidence before drawing her own conclusions.
 

 

Converts are often the most zealous enforcers of the formal strictures of a religion; similarly, the most ardent enforcers of a hierarchy are often those in the middle, the ones who see any progress by those below them as a threat to their own hard-won positions. Georgette Heyer was one of these. Heyer was the granddaughter, on one side, of a Russian emigrant -- almost certainly a Jew, although there are no records of this and the family never spoke of it-- who worked his way up from being a warehouseman to a businessman; on the other side, of a family whose money came from a successful tugboat company. Heyer came, in short, from Trade, and from families that had fought their way up to Trade from the working classes. Heyer's novels, on the other hand, laud the inherent superiority of the nobility.

 

For instance, In These Old Shades, a noble girl and a peasant boy are switched at birth -- it's a Heyer novel, there's usually cross-dressing -- and each child demonstrates his or her inherent class throughout rearing. At the climax, the peasant-raised-noble is greatly relieved to lose the position of heirdom to a great French title and to retire to a farm, while the noble-raised-peasant gets to marry a fellow noble who recognized her probable parentage at sight. That's standard Heyer, and TOS is one of my favorites of her books.. When I read Heyer's letters, I am reminded that this wasn't just Heyer's id-fantasy: it was how she really thought the world did and should should work.  A tobacconist's assistant and fan once wrote Heyer complaining about a speech in a modern novel that included the line "It's always been my dread that he might marry something [sic] out of a tobacconist's shop so you can imagine what a relief to me it is to know that he's had the sense to choose a really nice girl. Not that I'm a snob, but there are limits, and young men are such fools." Heyer commented on this letter to a friend: "I can see not the slightest reason for encouraging her. I don't write for that kind of person, after all, & if she chooses in future to ban me from her library list it's all the same to me. What is more, there is nothing to be said. I should regard it as a major tragedy if my son were to marry a tobacconist's assistant." Kloester comments:

 

Although [Heyer] held to the idea of a natural social hierarchy, she also recognized the capacity for vulgarity in any individual regardless of class [ha!] and frequently depicted dishonorable aristocrats alongside principled lower-class characters [Note: vulgarity is different from honor. ] Ever class-conscious, in Horsham society she felt herself to be on the same social plane as those who moved in "county" circles, despite the fact that she did not own an estate, hunt, or even farm her own land. [And also despite the fact that she moved household every few years.'] ... Georgette's particular kind of snobbery was rarely overt -- she was much too private for that -- [huh?] but it is implicit in most of her public and private writing.

 

Kloester, a thorough researcher, cites one of Heyer's childhood favorites, The Red Deer.

 

But the Hind looked grave. "We are never unkind to the Trout, she said, for they belong to the peat stream but you must never become familiar with them. Fallow Deer, I believe, treat them as equals," and here she looked very proud, "but we do not. They are a lazy lot of fellows whose forefathers would not take the trouble to go down to the sea, whereby they might have grown into noble fish with a coat as bright as the moon on the water. But they would not, and so they have remained small and ugly, and they never lose their spots. You must never be rude to them, for that would be unworthy of a Red Deer, but you must never make great friends with them ."
 

In short, the tobacconist's family should have swum ... I don't know, into somebody else's oviduct?

Two generations previously, Heyer's paternal ancestors had been peasants in Russia; her mother's family owned tugboats; and yet she considered herself infinitely above a tobacconist. She had a similar pull-the-rope-up attitude toward feminism. Although Heyer spent most of her life supporting her husband, her widowed mother, and her brothers, she was firmly convinced that women were less intelligent and less competent than men. She thoroughly disliked Dorothy Sutherland, the editor of Woman's Journal, for the very good reason that Sutherland rewrote and retitled Heyer's novels, without consulting the author, when she serialized. Whenever Heyer spoke of Sutherland in her letters, she referred to Sutherland as "that Sutherland Bitch" or "the S.B." So far, so normal; a bad or unsympathetic editor is a nightmare for any writer. When Heyer wrote to a friend after Sutherland refused to buy a novel Heyer had edited to Sutherland's request, she commented "Saving your presence, she is treating me to a startling example of the folly of Woman at the Helm."
 

 

Seen from the outside, Heyer's personal life is as unfair as most Victorian authoresses' [term deliberate]. Heyer's beloved father, collaborator, and friend dropped dead of a heart attack in 1925, when he was 56 and she was 23 . He didn't leave much money; Kloester doesn't address why there was no insurance. Heyer's mother made no attempt to support herself. Heyer's eldest brother, Boris, then 18, had both hemophilia and what was perceived as pure irresponsibility (but sounds, from a distance, like mild bipolar; he had mood swings). Both of them had to be supported -- in a separate household, because Heyer didn't get along with her mother -- for the remainder of their lives. (Heyer's youngest brother, Frank, was thirteen when his father died, and did grow up to be an independent adult.)  Furthermore, Heyer's husband, Ronald Rougier, had a great deal of trouble finding a career that would support his own family, far less his in-laws.  Rougier had been trained as a mining engineer, but he never made the big strike.  He then invested in two different businesses that didn't go much of anywhere. Unlike Boris, Rougier wasn't irresponsible; he was simply, like thousands of other returned veterans, struggling in the postwar economy. In 1936, when Rougier himself was 36, he decided to try for the career he had wanted as a young man and began reading for the Bar; this meant three years without any income at all, and with heavy additional expenses. (He eventually became a very successful barrister and was made a Queen's Counsel in 1959, so the studies for the bar were a wise investment.) Heyer spent more than a decade as the principal support for six people, all the while ardently supporting the idea that women were innately less competent than men. Not surprisingly, she had a nervous breakdown in 1935; in the three years since her only child's birth she had "moved house twice, written six books, endured periods without domestic support, suffered several episodes of severe financial strain, and committed herself to writing seven new novels."    She was carrying immense burdens, including trying to  pay the expenses of an upper-middle-class household on a middle-class income, while writing frothy comedies of manners.   
 

 My fundamental problem when reading Heyer's letters is that I just don't like her, and I'm quite confident that she wouldn't have liked me.