In 1960 the Attorney General, Lord Somervell, left his entire Georgette Heyer collection to the Inner Temple Library. Quite apart from having a name that makes him sound as though he had stepped straight from one of Heyer's Regency romances, Somervell was inadvertently providing an anecdote that would get recycled over the years whenever someone wanted to show just how different Heyer was from the normal run of popular historical novelists. Professional men and clever women have always lined up to say just how much they relish Heyer's world of rakes, pistols at dawn and spirited heroines with a penchant for cross-dressing. AS Byatt said so in a piece in a 1969 edition of Nova and, like Somervell, finds herself trotted out as proof that Heyer is different from Catherine Cookson or Barbara Cartland. Clever people like the way Heyer makes the Regency sound real, goes light on the love stuff and rattles along at the pace of a mail coach that is determined to beat its own record: she is like Jane Austen but without the boring bits, of which there are more than most of us care to remember.
Heyer has been the subject of a biography once before, by Jane Aiken Hodge in 1984, 10 years after Heyer's death at the age of 71. Now Jennifer Kloester has stepped into the frame, boasting a bit too loudly about the fact that she has tracked down new letters and been given material by Heyer's only son, the late Sir Richard Rougier, yet another splendidly named character. But if ever there was an example of how biographical research lies inert unless it is imagined into life, then this is it. Kloestler has written a book as flat-footed and deaf to history as Heyer's were attentive and perfectly pitched.
To be fair, Kloester's task is not a particularly easy one. Heyer is a hard woman to warm to, although you do find yourself developing a sneaking regard for the way she conducted her writing life. She was appalled by personal publicity, thought biographical puffs were twaddle and tended to greet any request for a photographic session with the announcement that she was just off to the South Pole. The idea of meeting a fan for a drink at the Ritz, mooted for publicity purposes, struck her as "quite fatuous". The denigration of her readers isn't pleasant, although her refusal to have anything to do with her fellow "inkies" seems entirely sensible. She never missed a deadline, didn't fish for compliments, and worked on a carefully calibrated mixture of cigarettes and Dexedrine. She heroically provided not just for a husband who failed to pull in a substantial income until he was middle-aged, but also two hopeless brothers and a couple of stalwart aunts. She regarded income tax as a particularly filthy trick aimed directly at her, but could never be bothered to sort out her finances, perhaps because she would then have no reason to carry on writing like a fury. She was quietly proud that her son Richard turned out so well – he didn't just have a name like one of her heroes but the looks, brains and dash too – but would have rather died than told him so, having a particular dislike for what she called "soul-throbs".
Although it would take a more skilled writer than Kloester to make us like her subject, she might still have done useful work in helping us understand just why Heyer was so popular, selling a million copies each year in Britain alone by the time of her death. Kloester has a vague line about how Heyer's world of sparkling shoe buckles helped people get through the grey days of the depression and the second world war, but this won't quite do. Heyer didn't become a global phenomenon until the mid-1960s, by which time both Cilla Black and the Queen – neither women who had particular reason to want to escape their circumstances – were declaring themselves ardent fans. Nor does Kloester look in any detail at what makes Heyer Heyer and not, say, Barbara Cartland, that publicity-mad confection of rouge and frou-frou who ripped off her rival's research and still managed to get most of the details wrong.
Heyer's prose is often described as "sparkling" but in fact it is closer to bracing, as if a particularly energetic attendant at Bath had given you a brisk rub down with a loofah. Yet Kloester pays no attention to its particular music, preferring instead to tell us more about Heyer's periodic research raids on the London Library. Even here, though, there seems little interest in how this raw material got transmuted into narrative gold: on one occasion Kloester tells us that Heyer's meticulous first draft was often her final one, yet on another she describes her submitted manuscripts as "typically full of additions, deletions and interpolations".
The chief problem with this book, though, remains the way that Kloester is in thrall to the much-vaunted letters and other material that she has tracked down in archive collections around the world. Heyer was an emotionally contained woman who wouldn't have dreamt of dumping her inner life on to paper. Yet Kloester is determined to lay out her dusty treasures, and the result is a narrative that often reads like a particularly pedestrian round-robin, full of golfing holidays in Scotland, ailing sisters-in-law and spats with the dratted tax man. In short, she has managed to pull off something you might have thought impossible: she has made the creator of Regency Buck and Lady of Quality sound like a bit of a bore.
Kathryn Hughes's biography of Mrs Beeton is published by HarperPerennial.
