Anne here, and today I'm bringing you another Georgette Heyer blog featuring some snippets from The Novels of Georgette Heyer, an upcoming book by Jennifer Kloester, Heyer's biographer. They are, of course, published with Jen's permission. (We'll let you know when the book goes on sale.)

Today we are dipping into These Old Shades, which was my first ever Georgette Heyer. You've probably heard me tell this story, so forgive me if you have and skip this paragraph. I was 11 and my friend Merryn and I, both prolific readers, were fed up with having to stick to the books in the children's library. But the rules said you had to be over 12, so . . .
It was a dare. Merryn dared me to borrow a book from the adult section. I said, "All right, I will! Which book should I get?" She said her mother liked Georgette Heyer, so I grabbed the first one I saw, which happened to be These Old Shades. It was a weird title and I had no idea what it would be like, but I didn't care. And to our amazement, the librarian didn't bat an eye!
So These Old Shades became my first Heyer, and I not only devoured it, it will always hold a special place in my heart. (Coincidentally it was Jen Kloester's first as well.) Since then, on many different Heyer sites, people often ask, "What was your first Heyer?" I think we remember our first because it ushered us into a whole new reading world, a world to which many of us became, and remain, addicted.
So, on to Heyer and These Old Shades. Georgette was very close to her beloved father, who was friend and mentor as well as father. On 15 June 1925 George Heyer had a heart attack and died in front of his 22-year-old daughter.
After that Georgette struggled to write for months. But she had a contract to fulfil, and eventually, she returned to a story she'd begun three years earlier as a kind of sequel to her first book, The Black Moth.
At the time (1923, long before her father's death and in a burst of enthusiasm for the book) she wrote this to her agent:
The sequel is naturally a much better book than the Moth itself, and is designed to catch the public’s taste. I have also tried to arrange it so that anyone who reads it need not first read the Moth. It deals with my priceless villain, and ends awfully happily. Tracy becomes quite a decent person, and marries a girl about half his age! I’ve packed it full of incident and adventure, and have made my heroine masquerade as a boy for the first few chapters. This, I find, always attracts people!
Georgette Heyer to L.P. Moore, letter, 23 January 1923.
Interesting, isn't it, how clear-headed she was — and at such a young age — about what readers would respond to. And how determined she was to "catch the public's taste."