Georgette Heyer

If anything good can be said to have resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, it is that people once again turned to reading as a past-time, and grown women, falling back on what surely had been a teenage comfort, began to make a big noise about Georgette Heyer (1902-1974). Heyer was a prolific English historical novelist who had a loyal following among women during her lifetime and beyond, who arguably created the Regency romance genre that has been exploited by dozens of later (mostly lesser) writers, and whose works remained widely unnoticed after her death. She gave no interviews during her lifetime, although at least one of her books, The Foundling, was reviewed in 1948 by the New York Times, which stated, "Miss Heyer writes cheerful and highly unorthodox historical novels about Regency England, in which people never lose their lives, their virtue or even their tempers". But the tide has turned; by 2022, Vox had headlined her ("When will Hollywood discover Georgette Heyer?"), public libraries finally noticed that her books are not only still in circulation but often have a waitlist, and there is even a Georgette Heyer podcast.

Inspired by the social setting of the Jane Austen novels, Heyer wrote more than two dozen historial "romances", mostly set in England's Regency period (1811-1820) or earlier

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