Georgette Heyer - Early Years

Early Years

Heyer was born in Wimbledon, London in 1902. She was named after her father, George Heyer. Her mother, Sylvia Watkins, studied both cello and piano and was one of the top three students in her class at the Royal College of Music. Heyer's paternal grandfather had emigrated from Russia, while her maternal grandparents owned tugboats on the River Thames.

Heyer was the eldest of three children; her brothers George Boris (known as Boris) and Frank were four and nine years younger than her. For part of her childhood, the family lived in Paris, France, but they returned to England shortly after World War I broke out in 1914. Although the family's surname had been pronounced "higher", the advent of war led her father to use the pronunciation "hair" so they would not be mistaken for Germans. During the war, her father served as a requisitions officer for the British Army in France. After the war ended he was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE). He left the army in 1920 with the rank of captain, taught at King's College London and sometimes wrote for The Granta.

George Heyer strongly encouraged his children to read and never forbade any book. Georgette read widely and often met with her friends Joanna Cannan and Carola Oman to discuss books. Heyer and Oman later shared their works-in-progress with each other and offered criticism.

When she was 17, Heyer began a serial story to amuse her brother Boris, who suffered from a form of haemophilia and was often weak. Her father enjoyed listening to her story and asked her to prepare it for publication. His agent found a publisher for her book, and The Black Moth, about the adventures of a young man who took responsibility for his brother's card-cheating, was released in 1921. According to her biographer Jane Aiken Hodge, the novel contained many of the elements that would become standard for Heyer's novels, the "saturnine male lead, the marriage in danger, the extravagant wife, and the group of idle, entertaining young men". The following year one of her contemporary short stories, "A Proposal to Cicely", was published in Happy Magazine.