Breaking News: Conferences!

Laura Vivanco

The

first ever Australian conference on the life and works of Georgette Heyer: mistress of the Regency and historical romance, writer of detective fiction, and one of the most prolific best selling authors of the 20th century.

will be held on 25 February 2012 at the Epping Club, 45 Rawson St., Epping, NSW, Australia. One of the speakers will be Jennifer Kloester. More details here.

There will be a GLBT panel at the 2012 Romance Writers of America conference. The panel members are Kim Baldwin, Suzanne Brockmann, Lauren Dane, Sarah Frantz, K. A. Mitchell, Heather Osborn and Radclyffe. 

Horses, Heroes and Heroines

Laura Vivanco

Heroes are not infrequently to be found on horseback and horses have often featured on the covers of romances; I've posted a short piece about heroes, heroines and horses at my website. I should probably warn you that I chose the covers above purely because they include horses, not because they're attached to any of the texts I quote from in my mini-essay.

On the topic of covers and heroes, I thought I'd return very briefly to the issue of race and cover art by posting the cover of Cindy Dee's Soldier's Rescue Mission.

And re heroines in historicals, Isobel Carr has been doing a little bit of research into the ages at marriage of Georgian and Regency aristocrats:

How old were most daughters of the peerage (the most common heroines in our books) when they married for the first time? Stone’s chart shows that during the first part of the era, the median age was ~20-22. Post 1750 (correlating with the passage of Hardwicke’s Marriage Act; Coincidence?), that age jumps up to ~23-24. So, the most common age for the daughter of a peer to marry was not when she was in her teens, but when she was in her early 20s, and an unmarried twenty-five year old would not really be much of an outlier.

She also discusses accurate ages for heroes at marriage elsewhere in her post.

Teaching with "For Love and Money," part 2

--by Eric Selinger

I just sent my students in ENG 383 (Women and Literature: Popular Romance Fiction) a list of paper topics, and as you'll see in this post and the ones that follow, these topics draw on our initial experiences with Laura's For Love and Money. The papers will be 6-8 pages long--and once I have them in hand, I'll have more ideas about how the students have responded so far to the secondary text. My sense so far, based on class discussion, is that For Love and Money not only introduces students to some very useful ideas about the genre, but also models the application of those ideas in the form of good, thoughtful close readings. So far, in short, so good!

The first chapter in For Love and Money treats the five "modes" of literature identified back in the 1950s by Northrop Frye, discussing each of them (myth, 'romance,' high mimetic, low mimetic, and irony) with examples of how they show up in and shape one or more HMB romance novels. Since 2006 I've opened almost every one of my romance classes with a discussion of these modes, since they give me the opportunity to nudge students away from thinking of low-mimetic literary realism as the "norm" against which to measure other forms of fiction, usually in order to find them wanting in some way. For Love and Money makes teaching these modes and their relationships to one another very, very easy, and it primes students to look for them in the texts they go on to read.

The book then proceeds to discuss how and why romance novels also use "modal counterpoint," the interplay of contrasting modes in a single novel. This, too, is a topic that I've tried to approach in other classes, with mixed success, mostly when I teach Suzanne Brockmann's novel Unsung Hero. For Love and Money makes the concept very clear, and since modal counterpoint is quite vividly on display throughout The Duke is Mine, this was a godsend. Rather than balk at or get bewildered by the contrasting tones in the novel, students approached them as a deliberate aesthetic feature of the text--which meant that, in discussion, they could discuss the relationship between this feature (multiple modes in one text) and other multiplicities and doublings in the novel.

Here's the paper topic, then, which I hope will provoke some interesting close reading from the students:

1. The first chapter in Laura Vivanco’s For Love and Money sets out the five “modes” of literature identified by Northrop Frye and shows how attending to the “modal counterpoint” in a romance novel can make sense of its shifting tones, metaphors, and rhetoric. These modes (and modal counterpoint) can be understood from a purely aesthetic standpoint, in terms of the structure and individual character of any given novel, but they may also be looked at from other perspectives: for example, Vivanco argues that the use of hyperbolic metaphors and allusions to “romantic” and high mimetic mythoi might aim to capture something of the experience of “romantic illusion,” which demonstrably forms a part of falling in love, at least for some (see pp. 65-69).

Write an essay on the use of modal counterpoint in The Duke is Mine, using ideas from Vivanco, from class discussion, and from your own insight to understand how James deploys a variety of modes in the novel, playing them off against one another. Your essay can be comprehensive, drawing on scenes and passages from various parts of the novel to illustrate James’s use of various modes, or it can focus on the counterpoint between various modes in a single scene, attending closing to a single chapter or passage. In either case, please keep in mind the guiding principle of our class: you want to make the novel seem as interesting as possible, whether by showing that it is more complexly coherent and artfully constructed than it might seem at first glance or by showing that it is more interestingly self-divided, conflicted, and ambivalent.

We also spent some time on Chapter 2, which focuses on what Frye called mythoi. More on that chapter, and the paper topic that came out of it, in my next post!

Teaching with "For Love and Money"

--by Eric Selinger

Six years ago I taught DePaul University’s first course exclusively devoted to popular romance fiction: a gen-ed (or “Liberal Studies”) course that ran from E.M. Hull’s The Sheik (1919) to Bet Me, by Jennifer Crusie (2004). I have since taught about twenty-five courses on the genre, from large undergraduate surveys to senior and graduate seminars. The novels I've taught range from Christian inspirational romance to BDSM and LGBT romances, often accompanied by some range of essays and chapters from popular romance scholarship.

This winter, I'm teaching two romance classes, both of which I'm going to start blogging about here at Teach Me Tonight. One of them is built around fresh scholarly resource: Laura's brand new book, For Love and Money: the Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills & Boon Romance. I suspect I'm the first person to teach with this book, and I want to give anyone out there who might be considering it, either for class or for pleasure reading, a sense of how it's working in this context.

Let's start with logistics. When I asked my university bookstore to order hard copies of the book from Lulu, they balked, unused to dealing with an e-published / POD volume. (Our bookstore is a Barnes & Noble, and the fact that For Love and Money was available as a Kindle book, but not a Nook book, may have factored in their decision.) I promptly emailed the students directly, giving them links to download the book or purchase the paperback, and they were utterly unfazed by the prospect. About 2/3, I'd say, bought the paperback; the rest seem to be reading it on netbooks, e-readers, or tablets in class.

Because I wasn't sure whether they'd all have the book by the first full day of class, however--a worry I won't have in the future--I assigned some other reading before it. This is an upper-division undergraduate course, and I wanted to get students up to speed on the history of popular romance scholarship, the various debates that have structured it since the 1970s, and so forth. We started with three things:

• The chapter on "Reading Romantic Fiction" from Joanne Hollows' book Feminism, Femininity and Popular Culture (2000), which gives an introductory overview of critical debates from the 70s-90s, grounding them in critiques of mass culture that date back to the 19th century;
• The introduction to New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction, which covers the same period from a slightly different angle, and which brings things forward to the present, more or less; and
• My own essay in New Approaches, "How to Read a Romance Novel (and Fall in Love with Popular Romance)," which talks about why it's been so hard for critics to invest in giving "close readings" of romance fiction--and then offers an example of what such reading might look like, working with Laura Kinsale's Flowers from the Storm.

Not much discussion that day, I'm sorry to say--I think I over-prepped, as I sometimes do when nervous. Instead, I talked my class through the critical history outlined in these three readings, so that they'd have a sense of the charges against and defenses of popular romance fiction in the contexts of 1) critiques of mass culture more generally (many of which are highly gendered, as Hollows shows); 2) feminist debates about the genre, including over whether it should be thought about as "pornography for women"; 3) the response of romance authors to these debates, primarily as gathered in the Dangerous Men, Adventurous Women anthology; and 4) the "new wave" of romance criticism that begins somewhere in the late 1990s, and picks up in the early 2000s, and includes Laura's book.

For the second day of class, I'd assigned the Introduction and first chapter ("Mimetic Modes") of Laura's book. Our conversation began, though, with an extended discussion of her dedication: "To every Harlequin Mills & Boon author who has ever been asked, 'When are you going to write a real novel?'" I had students brainstorm lists of the characteristics of the "real novel" and the "Harlequin Mills & Boon novel," drawing on the previous day's reading and on their own gut sense, as English majors, of what these differences might be.

This turned out to be a fabulous way to organize our thoughts, both in terms of the texts themselves and in terms of the ways they're written, published, marketed, and consumed, per student assumptions and as these get discussed in classes at our university. I kicked myself that I hadn't asked these students to read anything from Mark McGurl's The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction After Henry James, which has a wonderful discussion of how the high-art novel emerges (quite anxiously) from the sea of popular fiction during the later 19th century, but their exposure to a bit of that history via the Hollows chapter proved helpful in clarifying just how deeply they've been indoctrinated in some old, quite sketchy ideas about the distinction between "real" art (which is deliberate, and evidently created in pursuit of craft, social commentary, or inward spiritual necessity) as opposed to popular culture (filthy lucre!).

The key terms in Laura's title and subtitle, Love and Money and Literary Art, provided us with a useful frame of reference here, as did her introductory discussion of popular romance being "literature's Other" (thus Curthoys and Docker, qtd. 12) or being seen as the "degenerate" form of an older, more artistic genre. (This as opposed to the evolutionary metaphors commonly used for detective and science fiction, which is said to start as pulp fiction and then rise to the status of literature, at least in the hands of this or that author.) We talked about the denigration of HMB and of popular romance more generally—what had they seen, heard, etc. here at DePaul--and ended with Laura's comparison between HMB fiction and 15th century cancionero love poetry, which really struck a chord with several students.

By the end of class, they were ready to talk about reading romance novels as "real novels," which laid the foundation for our next go-round. I'll blog about that later this week, and then, at the end of the week, about our first attempts to read a particular romance novel, The Duke is Mine by Eloisa James, with Laura's study in mind. I chose the novel because it so prominently features a "mythos," in Northrop Frye's terms--in this case, the story of the Princess and the Pea--and Laura's second chapter is all about the ways that HMB romances deploy and revise and comment on recurring stories, or "mythoi." As it turns out, however, the first chapter of For Love and Money, about various fictional "modes" and the aesthetics of "modal counterpoint," also turned out to be quite helpful. Stay tuned!

Penny Jordan

On the day of Penny Jordan's funeral I'd like to thank jay Dixon, author of The Romance Fiction of Mills & Boon 1909-1990s, for writing the following guest post about Penny Jordan's writing career for Teach Me Tonight.

Penny Jordan

24 Nov 1946 – 31 Dec 2011

 

Penny Jordan was born in Preston, Lancashire, and lived in north-west England throughout her life. A keen reader from childhood, her favourite authors were Jane Austen, Dorothy Dunnett, Charles Dickens, Georgette Heyer, Catherine Cookson, Shakespeare and the Bible. She died from inoperable cancer at the early age of 65.

As a consequence of her love of Heyer, she started her writing career as one of the Desmond Elliot stable of authors, writing Regencies as Caroline Courtney. The first was A Wager for Love, where the hero (who according to one reviewer is ‘a bit too stuffy’) abducts the heroine. Her second, Guardian of the Heart, has a more typical Jordan hero: cold and aloof and out for revenge.

An insatiable storyteller, while writing Caroline Courtney Regencies she also wrote between 1981 and 1983, three air-hostess romps as Melinda Wright and two thrillers as Lydia Hitchcock, but her big break came in 1981, when an editor at Mills & Boon picked up Falcon’s Prey from the slush pile. A sheik novel, it has a dictatorial hero, who believes the heroine is a gold-digger and treats her accordingly. This remained a typical hero for Jordan, but she was also able to reinvent her M&B novels so that, for instance, in her 50^th novel for them, Loving, published in 1986, quite early on in the novel the hero is ‘stripped of his masculine arrogance’ and the heroine, who was raped as an eighteen-year-old, ‘blot[s] out his masculinity’ in order to talk to him. This picture of a hero is a far cry from one whose ‘study was an openly sexual one, and not merely sexual but contemptuous’ (Passionate Protection, 1983, p.25), or who ‘wouldn’t allow her to have any views that weren’t his’ (The Inward Storm, 1987, p.12), which are Jordan’s more usual type of hero.

[On 24 January jay Dixon adds:  I have now confirmed that Penny Jordan also wrote circa 7 novels as Frances Roding for M&B early in her career.]

In 2007 Jordan was interviewed by the Romantic Novelists' Association (who presented her with a Lifetime Achievement award in 2011), where she said in answer to a question about repeating plots: ‘In each book the characters are different, with different approaches and reactions, so the plot is bound to develop differently. Each new hero/heroine has a unique past, their own feelings and new conflict so any coincidental plot similarities don’t matter.’ (Romance Matters, p.9). This is reflected in her 1994 novel French Leave, where the hero is in disguise, and it is the heroine who misunderstands him and his motives.

Although some of her Regency heroines were naïve innocents, her Mills & Boon heroines were ‘self-determining with decent careers and some experience of life’ (Fabulous at Fifty, p.241), and always fought their corner.

In 1994 Harlequin set up the MIRA imprint, and Jordan was among their first authors. Her first two novels for them were New York Times bestsellers, and her third, Hidden Years, was her personal biggest mainstream seller. It still has her trademark dictatorial male figure, but the emphasis is on the mother/daughter relationship of the two main characters.

However, after 10 years her sales started to fall, and her contract with them was eventually cancelled. She started looking for another publisher, and so the Annie Groves sagas were born, under the HarperCollins imprint. These are Second World War stories based on her own family’s memories. A different style from her Mills & Boon novels, they are set in Liverpool and emphasise the home and family – for instance in the Campion series many of the important decisions are taken in the yellow-painted kitchen, which becomes a symbol throughout the novels of family love and understanding.

A versatile author – as well as her Regencies, thrillers, Mills & Boons and sagas, she leaves a complete but unpublished history of Richard the Lionheart – Jordan was able to adapt her style and plotting to the demands of her chosen genre without losing any of the vitality of her writing. With only three ‘O’ levels to her name, in English language and literature and geography, on the advice of Desmond Elliot, who told her ‘you can write’, she never took a writing course. Nonetheless, she became not just a successful author, but attained and remained at the top of her profession for decades. She wrote well in many genres, yet remained unassuming, diffident about her own talent, but always keen to help new writers.

-----------

Works Cited

• Fabulous at Fifty: Recollections of the Romantic Novelists’ Association 1960-2010, ed. Jenny Haddon & Diane Pearson. The Romantic Novelists' Association, 2010
• Romance Matters, February 2007 

As Caroline Courtney

• A Wager for Love, 1979 Warner Books
• Guardian of the Heart, 1979 Warner Books

As Penny Jordan

• Falcon’s Prey, 1981 Mills & Boon
• French Leave, 1994 Mills & Boon
• Loving, 1986 Mills & Boon
• Passionate Protection, 1983 Mills & Boon
• The Hidden Years, 1990 Mira Books
• The Inward Storm, 1987 Mills & Boon

Campion Family Series as Annie Groves:

• Across the Mersey, 2008 HarperCollins
• Daughters of Liverpool, 2008 HarperCollins
• The Heart of the Family, 2009 HarperCollins
• Where the Heart Is, 2009 HarperCollins
• When the Lights Go On Again, 2010 HarperCollins

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Obituaries can be found at The Guardian, the Harlequin blog, the Mills & Boon website, the Pink Heart Society blog and the RNA blog, and there have also been many individual tributes written by her colleagues.

Romantic Times with Eric and Sarah

Laura Vivanco

Eric and Sarah are in the February issue of RT Book Reviews:

In the February issue of RT BOOK REVIEWS, we profiled the nonfiction academic study of romance, New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction: Critical Essays, edited by two professors, Sarah S.G. Frantz and Eric Murphy Selinger. The volume, which will be published this year by McFarland, contains 18 essays about the romance genre and community, from luminaries in the academic world as well as romance authors and bloggers. The editors had so much to say about romances and genre fiction and their fascination with the books, that we wanted to continue the interview in online. So today we're bringing you the extended Q&A with the book's editors and RT Managing Editor Liz French.

The "extended Q&A" with Sarah and Eric can be found here and the list of "luminaries," their contributions and those of the other authors whose articles are included in the volume, can be found here.

Miscellaneous

Laura Vivanco

I'd been wondering when the current economic climate might begin to affect the Greek and Italian tycoons who inhabit romances, and recently I came across this in Sara Craven's Wife in the Shadows (Mills & Boon, June 2011):

any kind of open scandal should be avoided, particularly at this moment. The quality of the Galantana brand of clothing had saved the company from the worst effects of the global recession - indeed, they were planning expansion - but for that they needed extra finance for more new machinery at the Milan factory, as well as buying another site for workshops near Verona.
Which was principally why he had accepted Silvia's dinner invitation, because he'd learned that Prince Cesare Damiano, head of the Credito Europa bank would be present [...].
He and Prince Damiano had spoken briefly but constructively, and negotiations were now proceeding. And while the banker was a charming, cultivated man with a passion for rose-growing, he was also known to be a stickler for old-fashioned morality.
Any overt lapse on Angelo's part could well blow the deal out of the water. (14-15)

The situation described in the first paragraph fits rather well with the reality described in an article on the BBC website, from 1 November 2011:

There are no price tags on the clothes in Brunello Cucinelli's showroom in Milan.

The people who shop in the designer's store do not need to worry about how much they are spending.
And Mr Cucinelli doesn't feel he needs to worry about talk of a double-dip recession in Europe.
"This is the century of China," he says.
"This will mean billions of human beings coming towards us and asking to live in a different way. These people are fascinated by our quality, by our culture, by our craftsmanship."
Too true, says Italy's luxury goods trade group Altagamma.
It sees sales in European markets growing by 3.75% next year.

Jeannie Watt has taken a look at the changing trends in Supperromance covers, from 1980 to the present.

I've been guest-blogging at She-Wolf's (about medievalism and how it's shaped my approach to reading Harlequin Mills & Boon romances), at Read React Review (about "high" art and the way it's been defined in opposition to works which are commercially successful) and I've also received some nice comments about For Love and Money from Kate Walker.

I've also been updating Teach Me Tonight's look, in response to C. M. Kempe's plea that I "consider adding share buttons to the end of every post to make the redistribution easier." There are now share buttons at the end of each post and there are also some on the sidebar. This did involve redesigning the blog a little: we're still pink, but the look of the new template's a bit simpler.

The Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand (PopCAANZ) 2012 conference will be held at the Langham Hotel in Melbourne on the 27th, 28th and 29th of June. More details can be found here.

[Edited to add: Remittance Girl, an author of erotica (not romance) challenges fellow authors to write sex scenes which will evoke readers' lived experiences:

I don't want to connect with my readers over a landscape of commercialized sex. When they read a piece of my erotic work, I attempt, as far as possible, to ensure that what they're imagining calls to their real memories and lived abstractions, not a porn flick. Because I feel that the story will resonate at a deeper level if my words are associated with their real, felt, lived erotic experiences.

This is definitely an issue of relevance to romance as well as to erotica. For instance, Smart Bitch Sarah recently posted about the hymen because "I thought we'd gone over this in the past few years enough times that folks knew this information already. But it seems like we need a review because authors still don't seem to know where the hell the hymen is." As Dani A. points out in the comments, "Bad anatomy in romance isn't just aggravating, it's probably causing real harm and anxiety to people who don't know better and think that the books are right and somehow it's their bodies that are wrong."]

Bearing Free Heyer Stories I've Travelled Afar

Laura Vivanco

Following the recent JPRS call for papers on Georgette Heyer, I was reading Jennifer Kloester's new biography of Heyer (some reviews can be found here, here and here and there's a preview here).

Kloester's mention of a short story " 'On Such a Night', which [Heyer's] agent sold to an Australian magazine (so far the story remains undiscovered, with no indication of what it was about or the period in which it was set)" (148) sent me off to see what I could find. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my journey didn't lead me where I hoped it would, though I did discover that on Wednesday 24 November 1937 the story was broadcast on Australian radio (Station 2GB between 11.45 and 12 noon).

I did, however, find two short stories by Heyer, "Lady, Your Pardon" and "Incident on the Bath Road," which were entirely new to me. So, in the spirit of Epiphany, I thought I'd bring you some gold from an archival treasure Trove. Below are links to those two stories and a few others you may or may not have already read. I've also discovered serialised versions of a number of Heyer novels, so I've included links to those too, though only to the first page of each installment, or this post would have got unmanageably long.

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Short Stories

"A Proposal to Cicely" (1922)- via Jane Austen's World. [According to Fahnestock-Thomas, it was first published in The Happy Magazine, 4 September 1922 (5) and it is reprinted in her Georgette Heyer: A Critical Retrospective.]

"Runaway Match" (1936) - (1), (2), (3) and (4) - The Australian Woman's Weekly, 12 June 1937. [According to Fahnestock-Thomas, who reprinted it in her book, this was first published in Woman's Journal in April 1936 (20).]

"Lady, Your Pardon" - (1), (2), (3) and (4) - The Australian Women's Weekly, 3 April 1937. [This story was originally titled "Pharaoh's Daughter" (Kloester 163) and since Heyer thought "it has the makings of a novel" (Kloester 221) the opening scenes became the basis of her full-length Faro's Daughter (1941). The two stories do, however, develop quite differently.]

"Incident on the Bath Road" -  (1), (2), (3) and (4) - The Australian Women's Weekly, 29 May 1937.

"Love is a Hazard" - (1), (2), (3) and (4)- The Australian Women's Weekly, 10 July 1937. [This is a version of "Hazard," one of the short stories later published in Pistols for Two (1960).]

"Pursuit" (1939) - via the Internet Archive. [According to Fahnstock-Thomas this was first published in The Queen's Book of the Red Cross. She reprints it in her book.]

"The Duel" - (1), (2), (3), (4) and (5) -  The Australian Women's Weekly, 28 October 1953. [This short story was later published in Pistols for Two.]

Historical Romances (mostly Regency)

The Black Moth (1921) [This is the full novel, I think, because it's out of copyright.]

Simon the Coldheart (1925)- in 5 parts in the Australian Women's Weekly.
20 Dec 1978; 27 Dec. 1978; 3 Jan. 1979; 10 Jan. 1979; 17 Jan. 1979.

Gay Adventure [Regency Buck] (1935)- The Australian Women's Weekly.
6 July 1935; 13 July 1935; 20 July 1935; 27 July 1935; 3 Aug. 1935; 10 Aug. 1935; 17 Aug. 1935; 24 Aug. 1935; 31 Aug. 1935; 7 Sept. 1935; 14 Sept. 1935; 21 Sept. 1935; 28 Sept. 1935; 5 Oct. 1935; 12 Oct. 1935; 19 Oct. 1935; 26 Oct. 1935; 2 Nov. 1935.

Kloester writes that Heyer was

incensed by the discovery that Dorothy Sutherland [editor of Woman's Journal] had re-named Regency Buck, Gay Adventure, with a caption that read: 'Gay Adventure - in the Dare-Devil Days when Men were Men and Women Seductively Coy!' above an illustration that made her strong-minded  heroine look exactly like the sort of insipid female she despised. Georgette found this sort of take on her work maddening, for she worked hard to lift her plots, characters and dialogue out of the rut of stereotypical and formulaic fiction. [...] She wrote to her agent to express her outrage: '[...] I am so furious I can't bring myself to reply. She chose that filthy title, Gay Adventure (it makes me sick to write it) without one word to me!' Nothing incensed Georgette more than interference in her work and Dorothy Sutherland's meddling was something she would not easily forgive. (147)

The Talisman Ring (1936) - The Australian Women's Weekly
5 Dec. 1936; 12 Dec. 1936; 19 Dec. 1926; 26 Dec. 1936; 2 Jan. 1937; 9 Jan. 1937; 16 Jan. 1937; 23 Jan 1937; 30 Jan. 1937; 6 Feb. 1937; 13 Feb. 1937.

An Infamous Army (1937) - Australian Women's Weekly
22 Jan. 1938; 29 Jan. 1938; 5 Feb. 1938; 12 Feb. 1938; 19 Feb. 1938; 26 Feb. 1938; 5 March 1938; 12 March 1938; 19 March 1938; 26 March 1938; 2 April 1938; 9 April 1938.

Friday's Child (1944) - Australian Women's Weekly
29 Jan. 1949; 5 Feb. 1949; 12 Feb. 1949; 19 Feb. 1949; 26 Feb. 1949; 5 March 1949; 12 March 1949; 19 March 1949; 26 March 1949; 2 April 1949; 9 April 1949; 16 April 1949.

The Reluctant Widow (1946)- Sydney Morning Herald , starting 31 Aug. 1946
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, Conclusion.

Arabella (1949) - in 10 parts in the Australian Women's Weekly
2 Jan 1952; 9 Jan. 1952; 16 Jan. 1952; 23 Jan 1952; 30 Jan. 1952; 6 Feb. 1952; 13 Feb. 1952; 20 Feb. 1952; 27 Feb. 1952; 5 March 1952.

The Grand Sophy (1950) - in 8 parts in the Australian Women's Weekly
28 Jan. 1953; 4 Feb. 1953; 11 Feb. 1953; 18 Feb. 1953; 25 Feb. 1953; 4 March 1953; 11 March 1953; 18 March 1953.

Bath Tangle (1955) - in 6 parts in Australian Women's Weekly
30 March 1955; 6 April 1955; 13 April 1955; 20 April 1955; 27 April 1955; 4 May 1955.

Sprig Muslin (1956) - in 7 parts in the Australian Women's Weekly
4 April 1956; 11 April 1956; 18 April 1956; 25 April 1956; 2 May 1956; 9 May 1956; 16 May 1956.

April Lady (1957) - in 5 parts in the Australian Women's Weekly
3 April 1957; 10 April 1957; 17 April 1957; 24 April 1957; 1 May 1957.

Sylvester (1957)- in 7 parts in the Australian Women's Weekly
11 June 1958; 18 June 1958; 25 June 1958; 2 July 1958; 9 July 1958; 16 July 1958; 23 July 1958.

Venetia (1958) - in 5 parts in the Australian Women's Weekly
22 April 1959; 29 April 1959; 6 May 1959; 13 May 1959; 20 May 1959.

The Unknown Ajax (1959) - Australian Women's Weekly
1 June 1960; 8 June 1960; 15 June 1960; 22 June 1960; 29 June 1960.

Historical Fiction

Royal Escape (1938) - Australian's Women's Weekly
18 Nov. 1939; 25 Nov. 1939; 2 Dec. 1939; 9 Dec. 1939; 16 Dec. 1939; 23 Dec. 1939; 30 Dec. 1939; 6 Jan. 1940; 13 Jan. 1940; 20 Jan. 1940.

Detective Novels

The Unfinished Clue (1934) - "Complete Booklength Novel" in the Australian Women's Weekly, 10 August 1935.

Death in the Stocks (1935) - "Long Complete Book-Length Novel" in the Australian Women's Weekly, 8 June 1935.

Behold, Here's Poison! (1936) - Australian Women's Weekly
23 Nov. 1940; 30 Nov. 1940; 7 Dec. 1940 ;14 Dec. 1940; 21 Dec. 1940; 28 Dec. 1940; 4 Jan. 1941; 11 Jan. 1941; 18 Jan. 1941; [it would appear there is no issue for 25 Jan. 1941] ; 1 Feb. 1941.

No Wind of Blame (1939) - Australian Women's Weekly
19 April 1947; 26 Apr. 1947; 3 May 1947; 10 May 1947; 17 May 1947; 24 May 1947; 31 May 1947; 7 June 1947; 14 June 1947; 21 June 1947; 28 June 1947; 5 July 1947.

Detection Unlimited (1953) - in six parts in Australian Women's Weekly
3 Feb. 1954; 10 Feb. 1954; 17 Feb. 1954; 24 Feb. 1954; 3 March 1954; 10 March 1954.

If any of those links are faulty, please let me know. I was very careful, but there were so many links to insert I may have slipped up somewhere.

This Australian Women's Weekly review of The Spanish Bride, from 29 June 1940, may also be of interest. It includes a photo of Georgette Heyer which I hadn't seen before and the reviewer draws parallels between the historical context of the novel and that of 1940:

AT such a time as this, with the newspapers carrying, every day, news of further advances on the part of troops driven forward by the will of a ruthless, determined, strongly armed aggressor, there is a message of comfort in this story of a desperate war, against another Continental dictator, over a hundred years ago.

Kloester also notes the relevance of world politics to Heyer's output:

The idea that war was impending pervaded British life throughout the late 1930s and each of Georgette's historical novels written between 1936 and 1939 was about war. After An Infamous Army was published she decided to write the story of Charles II's escape from Cromwell's England following the Battle of Worcester in 1651. (185)

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• Fahnestock-Thomas, Mary. Georgette Heyer: A Critical Retrospective. Saraland, AL: Prinnyworld, 2001.
• Kloester, Jennifer. Georgette Heyer: Biography of a Bestseller. London: Heinemann, 2011.

The image of the Three Wise Men carrying gold, frankincense and myrrh, came from Wikimedia Commons.