Georgette Heyer Biography
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
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The perfect accompaniment to the definitive new editions of Georgette Heyer's celebrated novels that are currently being reissued.
A remarkable biography of one of Britain's best-loved and best-selling novelists, 'the queen of Regency romance'.
Georgette Heyer remains an enduring international bestseller, read and loved by four generations of readers and extolled by today's bestselling authors. Despite her enormous popularity she never gave an interview or appeared in public. Georgette Heyer wrote her first novel, The Black Moth, when she was seventeen in order to amuse her convalescent brother. It was published in 1921 to instant success and it has never been out of print.
A phenomenon even in her own lifetime, to this day she is the undisputed queen of regency romance.
During ten years of research into Georgette Heyer's life and writing, Jennifer Kloester has had unlimited access to Heyer's notebooks and private papers and the Heyer family records, and exclusive access to several untapped archives of Heyer's early letters.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
English Regency social historian Kloester details the life of Georgette Heyer (1902 1974), the "Queen of Regency romance," who sold her first book at age 17 and, over the next 50 years, married Ronald Rougier, bore one son, and wrote 55 books. With access to a thousand pages of new material plus full access to Heyer's private papers, Kloester adds to, and sometimes corrects, some facts in Joan Aiken Hodge's 1984 biography, while remaining frustratingly reticent about others. Despite the new material Kloester, like Hodge, provides scant insight into the writing process of the fiercely private Heyer, who granted a single interview and destroyed all her manuscripts and most of her personal correspondence. Kloester relies on Heyer's early contemporary novels for clues to the author's inner life bolstered with guesses based on quotations from correspondence, especially with Heyer's agent and publishers. Kloester is not completely uncritical but her sympathy is obvious, often putting the best possible spin on Heyer's snobbery and poor financial decisions. The result is a parlor portrait of this famous writer who claimed to despise her readership while craving the critical attention that eluded her. 73 illus.
