n the 1920s, Georgette Heyer wrote a number of contemporary short fiction pieces, published in various women's and literary magazines of the era. Now, for the first time ever, these stories are collected in this fully-authorised anthology, with commentary by Heyer's official biographer, Jennifer Kloester, and Reading Heyer's Rachel Hyland. The stories include:
- “A Proposal to Cicely”
- “The Little Lady”
- "The Bulldog and the Beast”
- “Lincke’s Great Case”
- “Acting on Impulse”
- “The Chinese Shawl”
- "Whose Fault Was It?"
- "The Old Maid" The collection also includes a bonus Georgian tragedy, “Love", and the search for "On Such a Night", a story long-missing from the Heyer canon. Given their proper context within Georgette Heyer's burgeoning literary career, in many ways these stories serve as her "Juvenilia," and are not only of great scholarly and popular interest to those who study and enjoy Heyer's magical works, words, and worlds, but amply demonstrate the seeds of genius that have since made her one of the most enduring and admired authors of the 20th-century.
Author
Georgette Heyer was a prolific historical romance and detective fiction novelist. Her writing career began in 1921, when she turned a story for her younger brother into the novel The Black Moth. In 1925 she married George Ronald Rougier, a mining engineer. Rougier later became a barrister and he often provided basic plot outlines for her thrillers. Beginning in 1932, Heyer released one romance novel and one thriller each year. Heyer was an intensely private person who remained a best selling author all her life without the aid of publicity. She made no appearances, never gave an interview and only answered fan letters herself if they made an interesting historical point. She wrote one novel using the pseudonym Stella Martin. Her Georgian and Regencies romances were inspired by Jane Austen. While some critics thought her novels were too detailed, others considered the level of detail to be Heyer's greatest asset. Heyer remains a popular and much-loved author, known for essentially establishing the historical romance genre and its subgenre Regency romance.
