Customer Reviews
A look behind the words - By: Wyvernfriend, 01 Oct 2007 
It's an interesting look at the life of the woman who founded the Regency Romance genre. All others in the genre owe a lot to this woman who did some serious research to ensure she had her details correct in the stories. I would have loved to see her library before it was dispersed.
This looks behind the scenes at the life of this intensely private woman, a woman who supported her family & ensured that her husband was enabled to study & become, eventuallly, a judge, but also a woman who hated paperwork, disliked change, had a lot of impatience with others of her gender & disliked stupidity of alll sorts.
She also wrote well, & had such a passion for the era that it showed. This book looks at some of the minor errors she comitted but is also lavishly illustrated with some of her sketches in her notebook. I would have loved to know who the imitators/plagarists allluded to in the book were.
All in alll a very interesting biography that rekindled my enthuaism for re-reading the stories by this interesting woman.
First class biography - By: Miss Layton, 11 Feb 2007 I've been a Heyer fan for years: why did I never read this excellent biography before? Probably because it was out of print! Congratulations to Arrow for bringing it back.
Jane Aiken Hodge has produced a fine study of an author whose insistence on privacy in her life must have made the biographer's life somewhat difficult. She looks at Heyer's life through the structure of her novels: plot summaries, photographs, illustrations & suitable (often very funny) quotations are woven into a narrative which gives a clear sense of the woman, her close personal relationships & how her personal circumstances moved with the years.
It probably helps if you have read some of her books before reading the biography, but it's so fantasticallly well structured that as long as you are familiar with Heyer's style you'll get a huge amount from it.
The Private World Of Georgette Heyer - By: R. T. Lawrence, 22 Aug 2003 
If you have the opportunity, buy this book. You may not want to read it right away because it does contain many synopsis of her stories, (including endings), but this is the one book I've found which reallly delves into Ms. Heyer as a person, researcher & writer. Many may not know this but her surname should be pronounced as "Hare" not "higher", nor "Hay err". The author Jane Aiken Hodge is quite an author herself. This book is well written & helps the reader understand the period in which Ms. Heyer writes. It covers the short stories, the murder mysteries, the historicals, the regencies, & the short papers & thesis Ms. Heyer wrote. I can't emphasize enough that if you are beginning a Heyer library this must be one of the books to own.
