Forgotten Georgette Heyer stories to be republished

A trio of forgotten stories by the queen of Regency romance Georgette Heyer have been uncovered by her biographer and are due to be published, for the first time in almost 80 years, next month.

Heyer, known for her tales of romance and intrigue set during the early 19th century, died in 1974, the author of more than 50 books. She said of her work that “I ought to be shot for writing such nonsense, but it’s unquestionably good escapist literature”, and left behind several bestsellers, including Devil’s Cub (1932), Friday’s Child (1944) and The Grand Sophy (1950).

Heyer’s biographer Jennifer Kloester has now uncovered three short stories by the novelist that have not been seen since the 1930s. Two of the tales, Runaway Match and Incident on the Bath Road, were published in 1936 in the magazine Woman’s Journal. Edited by “the legendary and formidable” Dorothy Sutherland, Woman’s Journal had first published Heyer in 1935, when it serialised her novel Regency Buck. “Sutherland renamed it Gay Adventure, with the [subtitle] ‘In the Dare-Devil Days when Men were Men and Women Seductively Coy’ which enraged Heyer,” said Kloester.

Kloester found reference to the stories in a newly-listed archive of early Heyer letters at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma. “I was intrigued to think there were Heyer stories out there that no one had seen for decades,” she said, so she set off for England where she searched hard copies of thousands of magazines at the British Library’s newspaper archive.

“I would stand at my allotted table for eight hours at a time turning pages in those magazines. Searching Woman’s Journal was fascinating. It began in 1926 and was like reading a cultural history of England. So much of English life and ideas and attitudes were captured in its pages,” said Kloester.

Woman’s Journal regularly featured short stories by writers such as AA Milne, HG Wells, Daphne du Maurier, Agatha Christie, Evelyn Waugh – and Heyer. “Readers often bought the magazine because a favourite author’s name was on the cover. This was particularly true of Heyer from the late 1930s onwards. WJ eventually came to describe Heyer as ‘your favourite author’. It took me a while to get to the Heyer serials and short stories but when I did it was thrilling,” Kloester said.

The third story, Pursuit, was published in 1939 in a fundraiser book, The Queen’s Book of the Red Cross. All three are included in Snowdrift and Other Stories, which will be published on 20 October by William Heinemann.

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Kloester described the pieces as “classic Heyer Regencies written in true Heyer style with plenty of pace, wit and elegance”, adding that they also “also contain hints of the novels and characters to come”.

“They were written just after the publication of her first Regency novel, Regency Buck, and so are fascinating clues as to what is to come. Each of the three contain hints of characters and situations for stories that Heyer is yet to write and, as she later made clear in her letters, she used these early short stories as starting points for some of her later novels,” said the biographer.

Kloester believes that the author made the “quite deliberate” decision that most of her earliest short pieces would be “lost”. “In 2002, Sir Richard [Rougier, her son] gave me unfettered access to his mother’s papers and among them was a tantalising list of her short stories – not all of them, however, which led me to believe that she preferred to forget those published in the 1920s,” she said.

Heyer rarely found time for short stories later in her career, said Kloester: “From 1936, she became increasingly famous and the demand for her historical novels increased. She wanted to write more short stories and for a brief time thought she might ‘write one a month’ but this was a short-lived plan as her publishers were always eager for her next novel. She did manage to write the occasional short story throughout the 1940s and 50s and these were originally published in Pistols for Two – now newly published with the three additional stories as Snowdrift.”