Georgette Heyer is a foundational author for the modern Regency historical romance and society comedy.
Georgette Heyer was born in Wimbledon in 1902. She began writing as a teenager, initially creating an adventure story to entertain her younger brother, and published The Black Moth in 1921. Her husband’s work took the couple abroad for periods of their early married life, but Heyer eventually settled into a highly productive career that included historical adventures, contemporary detective stories and the Regency romances for which she became famous.
Heyer built a large private reference library and researched clothing, manners, transport, speech, military affairs and social hierarchy in unusual depth. Novels such as Regency Buck, Frederica, Venetia and Arabella combine romantic comedy with carefully controlled social settings, while An Infamous Army places its characters against the Battle of Waterloo. Her dialogue created a distinctive version of Regency idiom that has influenced generations of romance writers. Heyer died in 1974. Although later writers have imitated the surface features of her work, her strongest novels are grounded in precise observations of class, reputation, money and the limited freedom available to women in Georgian society.