Georgette Heyer - Marriage

Marriage

While holidaying with her family in December 1920, Heyer met George Ronald Rougier, who was two years her senior. The two became regular dance partners while Rougier studied at the Royal School of Mines to become a mining engineer. In the spring of 1925, shortly after the publication of her fifth novel, they became engaged. One month later, Heyer's father died of a heart attack. He left no pension, and Heyer assumed financial responsibility for her brothers, aged 19 and 14. Two months after her father's death, on 18 August, Heyer and Rougier married in a simple ceremony.

In October 1925 Rougier was sent to work in the Caucasus Mountains, partly because he had learned Russian as a child. Heyer remained at home and continued to write. In 1926, she released These Old Shades, in which the Duke of Avon courts his own ward. Unlike her first novel, These Old Shades focused more on personal relationships than on adventure. The book appeared in the midst of the UK General Strike of 1926; as a result, the novel received no newspaper coverage, reviews, or advertising. Nevertheless, the book sold 190,000 copies. Because the lack of publicity had not harmed the novel's sales, Heyer refused for the rest of her life to promote her books, even though her publishers often asked her to give interviews. She once wrote to a friend that "as for being photographed At Work or In my Old World Garden, that is the type of publicity which I find nauseating and quite unnecessary. My private life concerns no one but myself and my family."

Rougier returned home in the summer of 1926, but within months he was sent to the East African territory of Tanganyika. Heyer joined him there the following year. They lived in a hut made of elephant grass located in the bush; Heyer was the first white woman her servants had ever seen. While in Tanganyika, Heyer wrote The Masqueraders; set in 1745, the book follows the romantic adventures of siblings who pretend to be of the opposite sex in order to protect their family, all former Jacobites. Although Heyer did not have access to all of her reference material, the book contained only one anachronism: she placed the opening of White's a year too early. She also wrote an account of her adventures, titled "The Horned Beast of Africa", which was published in 1929 in the newspaper The Sphere.

In 1928, Heyer followed her husband to Macedonia, where she almost died after a dentist improperly administered an anaesthetic. She insisted they return to England before starting a family. The following year Rougier left his job, making Heyer the primary breadwinner. After a failed experiment running a gas, coke, and lighting company, Rougier purchased a sports shop in Horsham with money they borrowed from Heyer's aunts. Heyer's brother Boris lived above the shop and helped Rougier, while Heyer continued to provide the bulk of the family's earnings with her writing.