Acting on Impulse Read online

  CONTENTS

  ACTING ON IMPULSE

  Contemporary Short Stories

  by

  Georgette Heyer

  Overlord Publishing

  overlordpublishing.com

  Copyright Declaration

  “A Proposal to Cicely” © 1922; “The Little Lady” © 1922; “Linckes’ Great Case” © 1923; “The Bulldog and the Beast” © 1923; “Acting on Impulse” © 1923; “Whose Fault Was It?” © 1923; “The Chinese Shawl” © 1923; “Love” © 1923; “The Old Maid” © 1925

  Additional materials © 2019 by Jennifer Kloester and Rachel Hyland.

  Georgette Heyer’s Bibliography courtesy Jennifer Kloester.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Overlord Publishing. As was foretold.

  Check overlordpublishing.com for news of our other exciting releases.

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  With thanks to Ruth Williamson,

  for unmatched attention to detail.

  ~

  For Georgette, forever and always.

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  “A PROPOSAL TO CICELY”

  INTRODUCTION

  A PROPOSAL TO CICELY

  READING “A PROPOSAL TO CICELY”

  “THE LITTLE LADY”

  INTRODUCTION

  THE LITTLE LADY

  READING “THE LITTLE LADY”

  “LINCKES’ GREAT CASE”

  INTRODUCTION

  LINCKES’ GREAT CASE

  READING “LINCKES’ GREAT CASE”

  “THE BULLDOG AND THE BEAST”

  INTRODUCTION

  THE BULLDOG AND THE BEAST

  READING “THE BULLDOG AND THE BEAST”

  “ACTING ON IMPULSE”

  INTRODUCTION

  ACTING ON IMPULSE

  READING “ACTING ON IMPULSE”

  “WHOSE FAULT WAS IT?”

  INTRODUCTION

  WHOSE FAULT WAS IT?

  READING “WHOSE FAULT WAS IT?”

  “THE CHINESE SHAWL”

  INTRODUCTION

  THE CHINESE SHAWL

  READING “THE CHINESE SHAWL”

  “THE OLD MAID”

  INTRODUCTION

  THE OLD MAID

  READING “THE OLD MAID”

  “LOVE”

  INTRODUCTION

  LOVE

  READING “LOVE”

  THE SEARCH FOR “ON SUCH A NIGHT”

  GEORGETTE HEYER’S BIBLIOGRAPHY

  FURTHER READING

  INTRODUCTION

  BY JENNIFER KLOESTER

  I began my Georgette Heyer research journey in May 1999 with my first visit to the wonderful British Library. Arriving at King’s Cross Station (itself a name to conjure with!) and walking the short distance to the library, receiving a Reader’s Pass and gaining access to the reading rooms in that amazing building was, to me, akin to winning a Golden Ticket and being admitted to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. I was awe-struck by the King’s Library housed in its magnificent multi-storey glass tower at the top of the stairs and by the beautiful Rare Books and Music reading room where, over the next ten years, I would spend so many happy hours pursuing all things Heyer. I’ll never forget being allowed to take possession of Domenico Angelo’s School of Fencing, published in 1787, and spending a glorious hour leafing through its pages. Heyer had used Angelo’s guide in her own research and, though I did not know it then, this first foray into understanding her life and writing would mark the beginning of what has become a twenty-year adventure (which is still ongoing).

  In 2001 I began my Doctorate on Georgette Heyer and her Regency novels. In 2002 I travelled to England to meet her son, Sir Richard Rougier, her biographer, Jane Aiken Hodge, and to return to the British Library to further my research. In the first year of my Doctoral studies I had discovered the existence of several untapped archives of Heyer’s early letters and Sir Richard had generously granted me copyright permission to have access to these. It was here that I found the first clue that Georgette Heyer had written short stories in the early 1920s.

  At the time, the only Heyer short stories I had seen were the eleven historical tales that made up the 1960 anthology, Pistols for Two – republished in 2016 under the title Snowdrift, and including three more historical shorts I was able to unearth – all of which had been published from 1935 onwards. However, here among the collection of her correspondence owned by the University of Tulsa was a letter in Heyer’s own hand, written to her agent just a few months after her twentieth birthday, that said: “I’ve sent you another short story, and there is a third in the making.” I was instantly intrigued. While I knew it was possible that these early short stories, sent so enthusiastically to her agent, might never have been published, I also knew that I had to find out.

  The first challenge was working out where these early Heyer stories might have appeared. This was no easy task as the 1920s in England had been a Golden Age for short story writers with more fiction magazines published than at any other time. Scores of famous writers made their names writing for publications such as The Strand Magazine, Nash’s, The Happy Mag, Sovereign, The Quiver, Pall Mall, The Red Magazine and Pearson’s, among many others. Writers like Agatha Christie, P.G. Wodehouse, Richmal Crompton, J.B. Priestley, Daphne du Maurier, A.A. Milne, Sapper, and Ngaio Marsh found homes for their short fiction on a regular basis. As Mike Ashley observed in The Age of Storytellers, the 1920s would also be “the last haven of the popular fiction magazine” as the rise of radio in the 1930s saw the demand for short stories begin to decline.

  If Georgette Heyer had been published in one or more of these magazines, I reasoned, then it seemed likely that these would have been historical stories. Unfortunately, this gave me no real idea of which among dozens of likely magazines might have accepted her youthful tales. Fortunately, as I read through the archive of her letters I came across a clue. In 1936, Heyer had written two historical shorts and she wrote to her agent about them: “under no circumstances should they be offered to the cheap ‘popular’ magazines such as The Red & The Happy, etc.” Here at last was a clue to at least a couple of magazines where I could start looking.

  The biggest repository of UK magazines in the world is the British Library, and so I returned to that great institution and began my search for these forgotten Heyer works. One hundred and sixty microfilm reels later, I had found five short stories: three in The Happy Mag and two in the Red Magazine. It was an exhilarating experience. There is nothing like that moment when, after pages and pages and pages have been examined, suddenly – there in front of you – is Georgette Heyer’s name and above it the title of a story you have never heard of before. And then comes the thrill of reading for the first time the stories written when she was only twenty. I devoured “A Proposal to Cicely” (which was, I later discovered, republished in Mary Fahnestock-Thomas’s Georgette Heyer: A Critical Retrospective in 2001), “The Little Lady”, “The Bulldog and the Beast”, “Acting on Impulse” and “Whose Fault Was It?”. Five short stories, all set in contemporary times and each with something new to tell me about Heyer.

  Of course, such finds only made me long for more, and by now I had learned from Heyer’s letters that many of her novels had been serialised in the famous British magazine, Woman’s Journal. This collection was housed at the Newspaper Library – that arm of the British Library situated at Colindale, about forty-five minutes from London on the Underground. Today, Colindale is no more, but between 2002 and 2011 I travelled there many times. Though it was something of a trek, I always looked forward t