Talk:Georgette Heyer

Article expansion

I have been working to expand this article. Right now, I have only read Hodge's 1984 book about Heyer, so the references are all from that one source. I know that this is not the recommended method, and I will try to get some of the other books about her through interlibrary loan. In the meantime, if anyone else has additional material about her, please include it! I'll be working on this over the next several days, so please forgive me and the article if it appears to suddenly stop.Karanacs 03:54, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Link

I beg your pardon if I'm not doing this correctly - I'm not an experienced user of Wikipedia. However, I noticed that the bibliography doesn't include the link to the online text of "The Black Moth" (although it does link to the online text of "Pursuit") so I thought I'd leave the link to that here, and let someone who knows how to insert it correctly do so. :)

http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/heyer/moth/moth.html

~ Gfe

Imitators

Does anyone have any more information about the writers Miss Heyer thought were imitating her? It may be libellous to say they were actually doing so (which is presumably why Jane Aiken Hodge's 1984 biography didn't mention names). But it is surely a matter of fact that Miss Heyer thought so, and also that someone else (for example) used the phrase about "making a cake of oneself".

Paul Magnussen (talk) 22:39, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

It was widely reported in mid 2011 that Heyer had complained about Barbara Cartland stealing plots and characters. Google cartland heyer for information. TheOneOnTheLeft (talk) 10:50, 3 October 2011 (UTC)

Most of the news reports are discussing excerpts from a new biography due out this year. Once it is released and can be consulted directly this will definitely be worth including in the article, but I want to make sure we have all the background. Karanacs (talk) 14:26, 3 October 2011 (UTC)

GA review

I am reviewing Georgette Heyer. It will take a couple of days to read and review. Cheers!Wassupwestcoast (talk) 17:06, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, Wassup! Seems like I run into you everywhere nowadays ;) Karanacs (talk) 17:40, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

No problem! As a prelude to reviewing Heyer, I've read the appropriate entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and Contemporary Authors. Cheers! Wassupwestcoast (talk) 20:06, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

review

• Too much finger counting; please include more references to her actual age at important points of her life.

• The article fails to mention a fascinating detail. Her father keeled over from a heartattack while playing tennis with Heyer's boyfriend.

• • While vacationing with her family in December 1920, Heyer met George Ronald Rougier, who was two years her senior and taller than her own 5 ft 10 in (177 cm). Four ideas in one sentence but not convincingly sub-ordinated. It is strangely ambiguous because it doesn't explain why the vacation, age, or height are important. They are all treated equally without comment. There are several other examples of these types of sentences. For example;
  • Two months after their marriage, Rougier, who spoke Russian, was sent to the Caucasus Mountains for work. These sentences are confusing /ambiguous. Rougier was sent because he spoke Russian or did it have something to do with his marriage. And, who sent him - passive voice - and why did he speek Russian.
  • They lived in a hut made of elephant grass located in the bush,[8] and Heyer was the object of much speculation, as her servants had never seen a white woman before.. The hut and speculation are treated as equal; strange conjuntion. Obviously, the servants were doing the speculating so why delay the info. In other words: 'They lived in a hut made of elephant grass located in the bush. [Full stop]. Her servants had never seen a white woman before and made Heyer the object of much speculation.

• Because Heyer's writing was set in the midst of events that had occurred over 100 years previously, she had to include more detail on the period in order for her readers to understand. As an explanation, this makes no sense. Contemporary people read Austen and - apparently - understand the novels. Why would Heyer have to pad? Was Heyer's audience not-so-bright? There are several more Austen/Heyer contrasts that fail to convince me. It sounds has if Heyer wrote purple prose and an apologist is trying to defend her.

• POV problem. The article has a fawning / melodramatic tone. "so extensive". "thoroughly". "only one anachronism". "drastic departure".

• The publication of the novel coincided with the birth of her only child, Richard George Rougier, whom she called her "most notable (indeed peerless) work." Another false equivalence. I doubt the baby and the novel have anything to do with each other. I realize some people might like the literary metaphor of the birth of a novel and a child...obviously Heyer did!

• Some typos and spelling errors:i.e. refaim

• Quite a few borderline run-on sentences: " Although the two were never as popular as other contemporary fictional detectives such as Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot and Dorothy L. Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey,[51] one of the books featuring these characters, Death in the Stocks, was dramatized in New York City in 1937 as Merely Murder." Borderline because the clauses are not independent, but because the intent of the sentences switches from comparison between authors to a New York drama. It's Ok but is ambiguous because it gives the illusion that Heyer wrote fanfiction! Note that the closest characters to the phrase 'featuring these characters' is Poirot and Wimsey rather than Heyer's own characters which are are mentioned way back at the beginning of the sentence as 'the two'.

• Might as well say that a guinea is (₤1 1 shilling).

• "I'm getting so tired of writing books for the benefit of the Treasury and I can't tell you how utterly I resent the squandering of my money on such fatuous things as Education and Making Life Easy and Luxurious for So-Called Workers". The best quote! That sums up her attitude pretty well. Maybe this should be highlight in a box.

• Deciding to end the company, Heyer asked her publishers to make out the rights to new newest book, The Black Sheep, in her personal name. Obviously there is a typo, but it is the adjective 'personal' that caught my eye. It seems strange. Was she using a nom de plume? Of course, 'Georgette Heyer' was her maiden name. So, personal name is 'Mrs. Roughier'?

• Financial issues. Probably too much detain and yet no mention of her worth at death (check the ODNB) which was about ₤68,000.

GA Hold. It's a pretty good bio but there are more sources - if it is taken to FA - and it should be copy edited / gone over one more time. So, I'll give it a week to dust it off a bit. Cheers! Wassupwestcoast (talk) 21:09, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

GA Pass

Reflecting on the GA criteria, this article is clearly satisfactory and a decent article. This article passes GA as is. My comments under the subheading 'review' are applicable to Wikipedia:Featured article criteria. Cheers! Wassupwestcoast (talk) 20:32, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Comments from Scartol

Having copyedited this article, I thank you for introducing me to a most intriguing new writer. While I don't know how likely I am to read any of her novels, you never really know – I read Bridges of Madison County, for crying out loud. Meanwhile, your prose is very solid and the details are refreshingly engaging. Nothing structural stands out as needing attention, which makes sense given the GA pass which happened recently.

Here are some comments and questions which came up in the course of my copyedit. I hope they're useful. Please don't feel the need to respond to each one or tick off what's completed; they're for you to consider and act on if you like. I'll probably respond if you ask a follow-up question, but you might want to talk me just in case.

• Georgette read widely and often met with Joanna Cannan and Carola Oman to discuss books. Were they friends, I assume? If so, we should add "her friends" after "with".

• Heyer met George Ronald Rougier, who was two years her senior and taller than her own 5 ft 10 in (177 cm). It looks like you're trying to insert her height for the sake of inserting it. But it's not really relevant here. I'd vote for simply removing it.

• Heyer was the object of much speculation, as her servants had never seen a white woman before. What sort of speculation? I'd really like to see more info here.

• In several places we're told of books' publication but we don't get any info about their content. (These Old Shades and Masqueraders) Could we get a phrase or a sentence for these?

• She also wrote an account of her adventures there, titled "The Horned Beast of Africa", which was published in 1929 in The Sphere. I assume "there" refers to Tanganyika? If so, the pronoun antecedent has been lost and should be explained.

• Heyer's earliest works were romance novels, most set in historical periods. I know what you're trying to say, but isn't every novel set in a historical period? Maybe we should reword.

• Could we get a number of how many copies Regency Buck sold?

• The first paragraph of "Regency romances" starts out discussing a single book, buy quickly moves into the effect of all of her novels; any way to slow down a bit and show the effect of the first novel, and then add in other info?

• The books revolved around a "structured social ritual..." Whenever I see a quote, I like to know in the sentence where it comes from. Maybe give us something like: "As CRITIC X points out, the books revolved..."? This same thing shows up elsewhere in the article as well.

• ...and an 1808 dictionary to the House of Lords. Is "to" the correct preposition here? (Maybe "which once belonged to"?)

• Her notes were sorted into categories, such as Boots and Shoes, Beauty, Colours, Dress, Hats, Household, Prices, Shops; and even included details such as the cost of candles in a particular year. Could we get quote marks around category names? (I assume "Boots and Shoes" is one; are the others all individual, or are some of them grouped?)

• In 1931, Heyer released her first historical novel, The Conqueror.... I'm confused. Don't the Regency romances qualify as "historical fiction", insofar as they're set in a specific historical era? I'd like to see a clarification of what makes a certain kind of novel "historical fiction".

• ...even replicating William the Conqueror's crossing into England. Does this mean she physically went along the same route? Dressed up in armor? It sounds like a pretty significant undertaking (it's mentioned in the lead), so I'd like to see a bit more detail about it.

• Two things for future reference: 1) Only put the final punctuation inside the quotation mark if the quote is itself a complete thought. (So: Heyer referred to her son as her "most notable (indeed peerless) work". I already fixed this. Just FYI.) 2) It's good to use a non-breaking space ( ) before an ellipsis so as to keep it from being at the start of a line by itself.

• Kind of a minor item, but I've found it best to mention the subject as soon as possible in a caption. So maybe the one in "Thrillers" could be something like: "William the Conqueror (depicted in this statue on the West Front of Lichfield Cathedral) was the focus of..."? Just a thought.

• In most of these novels, all set in the present day... When I read this, I think 2008. I assume it should be something like "all set in the year they were written"?

• ...Heyer's detective novels, the last written in 1953, often featured unoriginal methods, motives, and characters, with seven of them using inheritance as the motive. The word "unoriginal" is unclear here. Does this mean she used ideas from other people (which I thought on first read), or that she re-used her own ideas over and over?

• Can we get an example of her "distinct snobbery towards foreigners and the lower classes"?

• Heyer had "a quite remarkable gift for reproducing the brittle and ironic conversation of the upper middle class Englishwoman of that age (immediately before 1940) – is this last part in the original quote, or something you added? If the latter, I'd use brackets instead of parentheses.

• I'd prefer to see the heading as "Financial problems" rather than "issues". I always think of magazines when "issues" shows up. =)

• In 1939, Rougier was called to the Bar... I confess a pathetic ignorance of what this means. Clarify?

• Could we get a word or two about what her husband did in the BHG?

• ...to convince them to break her contract, she wrote Penhallow. Maybe give a word about why this might convince them to break the contract? ("...a book which...")

• I used spaced en dashes in the fourth paragraph of "Financial issues". I haven't seen any em or en dashes elsewhere in the article, so maybe this is a moot point. But if you've used a different kind elsewhere in the article (or decide you want to), you should change these too.

• "The inspector" is used twice quickly to refer to the tax inspector who busted her for undisclosed dividends. Was it a he? Could we use that once?

• Unless I'm mistaken, the non-breaking space isn't required for every time a number is used. Just numerals (ie, 45 miles).

• Heyer asked her publishers to make out the rights to her newest book, The Black Sheep, in her personal name. This is a pretty confusing sentence. I'm not sure how to reword it, but it could use some clarification. (Maybe just "...give her the personal rights to her newest book..."?)

• I don't know if "Regency slang" is a fair word choice. I usually think of slang as being a more modern invention. But it's your call.

• Phrases like "the other novelist" and "the other publisher" are distracting. Do we not know the author's name, I assume? Is there any way around this?

• Why did Heyer refuse to leak the copying to the press?

• With a sentence like "Heyer essentially invented the historical romance...", we should be careful. After all, Walter Scott was influenced by romanticism and wrote historical novels; I think it's best to make a point of clarification whenever such a claim is made here.

• Have later editions of Britannica mentioned her? Only mentioning the 1974 edition seems odd.

• Is the double-bullet style of grouping the articles from the one book in the References section standard? I've not seen it before...

• Insofar as this article is clearly dedicated to a British subject, we should make sure it uses British English exclusively; perhaps you're already looking out for this. I admit I was too stupid to keep this in mind as I copyedited, but I know that Roger Davies is very good at correcting such things. Perhaps we should ask him to do a run-through before FAC.

Good luck with this! As always, let me know if you have any questions. – Scartol • Tok 02:04, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Romance, i.e. boy meets girl, fall in love, usually some sort of problem that puts a spanner in the works, eventually marry and live happily ever after, is rather different from Romanticism, the linekd articles should explain the difference if someone is really unclear, but I htink it would rather disrupt the flow of the article to try and explain such widely known terms. Similarly the Conqueror, the description might perhaps be slightly clarified by saying "first purely historical novel" the key difference being that the history is the primary thing, with any romatic parts of the plot being secondary. I've now linked called to the Bar, does that help? David Underdown (talk) 11:21, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

It does help, but I'd like to see a short phrase explaining it for those of us unfamiliar with it. Perhaps we have a philosophical difference about how much explanation is necessary in the text of the article; a second (or third) opinion may be useful here. – Scartol • Tok 11:25, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

From my reading it's a term that sees fairly common usage in both British and American English, you'd need to insert the same explanation into hundreds of Wikipedia articles to be consistent. David Underdown (talk) 11:39, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Internal chronology of Regency novels

User:Pointillist, I reverted your addition of the internal chronology list as a reference. That website is not a reliable source, and thus should not be used as a citation. The information that is on the page you are linking is essentially fan-generated original research and is inappropriate for an encyclopdia article (especially one that should adhere to featured article standards. The main Georgette Heyer fan site is linked in the external links; anyone who is interested in learning more about her novels is able to navigate through the site and find the internal chronoloy list. I don't quite understand why it is important that we highlight that particular page in the article somewhere. Karanacs (talk) 20:17, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Hi Karen. Thanks very much for taking the time to put your revert explanation onto my talk page; I've moved it here so any interested editor can participate. I agree that fan websites are not automatically reliable sources - though I think there are examples of some Jane Austen society citations being acceptable even to editors as rigorous as Awadewit.

Anyway, this is my defence of citing the Georgette-Heyer.com website's chronology:

• Reliable source. The context (with my addition in italics) was: "Her knowledge of the period was so extensive that Heyer rarely mentioned dates explicitly in her books; instead, she situated the story by casually referring to major and minor events of the time, which some fans have used to infer the internal chronology of the novels.[ref georgette-heyer.com]". On reflection, don't you think that this fan site is a reliable source for a statement about what some fans have done, even if they are wrong?
• Original research. If you don't accept the link, would you accept that each of the fan site's specific inferences for each novel would be permissible on the page for that novel? For example, I was just reading Frederica and I came across the reference to Beau Brummell. Like any historically minded reader, I began to assemble known facts in order to infer the chronology. The fan site page says "Alverstoke is three years Brummell's junior (Chap. 6) and he has given his age to Frederica as 37 (Chap. 3). Since Brummell was born in 1778, Alverstoke must have been born in 1781, therefore it is now 1818." Would you regard this statement as original research if it appeared on the Frederica page?
• NPOV. If another source disagrees with the fan site's inferences, we can extend the sentence accordingly (e.g. "though other sources disagree"[ref]. Right now, though, I think this is the only place where people have taken the trouble to work out the dates.

Look forward to comments - Pointillist (talk) 22:37, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

My primary complaint, which has not bee addressed, is why this information needs to be added to the article at all? Why is it important to this article that fans have created an internal chronology of the books? This article is about Heyer, not about her fans or what they have done decades after her death. The fact that the fans have created the chronology does not add to our understanding of Heyer or her work. This seems to me more like advertising the fan site, which is inappropriate. Why do you think that the addition belongs in this article?

• I still disagree that the website is a reliable source. It is a self-published source, which should be avoided if at all possible, and when used in the way presented above it is a primary source (again, should be avoided if possible). If a newspaper article discussed what the fansite did, then we could reference that information; if no independent source feels that this information (fans created an internal chronology) is important enough to cover, then it should not be in the article. We should reflect what secondary sources think is important, not primary sources. And even if the secondary sources did discuss the fan-created chronology, I still don't see why we'd want to mention that in Heyer wikipedia article.
• I don't usually write articles on novels, but I occasionally review them at FAC. I would likely object to that information being used in a novel article because the source is self-published.

Karanacs (talk) 14:40, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

• Thanks again for explaining. OK, you've convinced me: the link doesn't belong in this article. - Pointillist (talk) 17:38, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Unlike Austen...

Karanacs,

I disagree that Heyer was "forced to include copious information about the period": it's always seemed to me that her books are written as if they might be contemporary -- hence the need for explanatory books such as "Georgette Heyer's Regency World" and "Georgette Heyer's Regency England".

But I don't want to get into an edit war, so I'll concede if you can give me a couple of good examples. Paul Magnussen (talk) 16:53, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

I can't/won't give specific examples from the books - I haven't read very many, and anyway that's original research. I have read just about all the biographical material about Heyer that I could find. One of the biggest themes these works stress is that Heyer collected a huge amount of detail about the Regency world; this detail was then incorporated into her books in a way that authors who wrote during that time period did not. For examples of secondary sources describing this, see Pamela Regis's A Natural History of the Romance Novel (pp. 125–126), and several essays in Georgette Heyer: A Critical Retrospective , including one by Lillian S. Robinson ("On Reading Trash", pp. 322-323) and one by Marghanita Laski ("Post The Appeal of Georgette Heyer", p. 284). These authors specifically compared Heyer's method of using details of the time period with Jane Austen's. Some quotes are given in the section Regency romances...I may have others in my notes if you want me to dig through. I'm open to rewording the sentence, but the theme is important and needs to be represented in the lead. Karanacs (talk) 17:10, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

---

On a separate point. The article says "the books were set almost entirely in the world of the wealthy upper class[28] and only occasionally mention poverty, religion, or politics (another way in which her novels reflect those of Jane Austen).[29]"

However Austen does NOT write about the wealthy upper class, none of her books are set in the London Season with mentions of Almacks and balls. I'm not even sure many of the characters refer to having been there. Perhaps the Bertrams. And Mansfield Park contans a quite extensive reflection on religion and Edmund becoming a clergyman. That's another striking difference of the social circles presented by Auster and by Heyer, at least two of Austen's young male heroes are clergy. That would be unthinkable in Heyer.PhilomenaO'M (talk) 07:23, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

not accurate

I don't know who claimed that Heyer "invented" romance novels or Regency romances but it's not true. She was imitating the original romance and Regency writers like the ones named in Northanger Abbey: Edgeworth, Austen, Radcliffe, and Burney, and their sisters and aunts Brunton, Scudery, Roche, Sleath, Mme Cottin, Mme de Souza. Most of these are available free online and some are quoted in Heyer's books. Oh yeah, I forgot Caroline Lamb's Glenarvon, which is referenced in Bath Tangle. That's also free online. 96.255.124.231 (talk) 10:37, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Assessment comment

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Georgette Heyer/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

Rated as Start class for the following reasons: Fairly comprehensive bibliography Useful list of printed sources and external links Lacks infobox Very limited biographical material, for example, lacking photograph Discussion of importance could be expanded Discussion of works could be expanded Espresso Addict 01:04, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

Last edited at 01:10, 9 January 2007 (UTC). Substituted at 16:05, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

Gay icon

Is she not a gay icon, like Joan Collins? Perhaps this should be mentioned. 86.187.165.22 (talk) 18:12, 18 August 2017 (UTC)

Needs sources. I can confirm that the books do have a certain gay following, but I'm not sure if it is significant, and in any case, there needs to be reliable sources covering this subject to make it worth a mention. Mabalu (talk) 09:43, 21 August 2017 (UTC)

Genres

Heyer essentially established the historical romance genre and its subgenre Regency romance... Her meticulous nature was also evident in her historical novels

Surely the Regency romances were historical novels. Valetude (talk) 10:49, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

...and in any case, the historical romance was nothing new. What about Sir Walter Scott, Dickens, Conan Doyle...? Valetude (talk) 00:23, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

Sir Walter Scott, Dickens, Conan Doyle wrote historical novels. The love story wasn't central in their novels. --Guil2027 (talk) 00:29, 31 January 2021 (UTC) (sorry for my english).