She especially needs someone who won’t badmouth her friends.

Is that really so much to ask?

The name Richard, by the way? Georgette Heyer really liked that name. Not only did she bestow it on several of her characters – Richard Carstares of The Black Moth, Richard Carmichael of Helen, Major Richard Fawcett of Pastel, Richard “Diccon” Dangerfield of Beauvallet, Sir Richard Wyndham of The Corinthian and Richard Chartley of The Nonesuch, plus Vidal’s groom Richards in Devil’s Cub – she also gave it to her son. [Note: For a time, he too was known as “Dicky.” It was not until he went to Cambridge that a close female friend suggested he become “Richard,” after which he was Dicky no more. - JK.]

Dogs would also come to be a regular feature in Heyer’s works, but happily none of her future creations ended up with such a misapplied name as Chu Chu San, which one can only assume came from the title of a “Japanese Fox Trot” written by one Joseph Samuels in 1919, and which would be fine, except that Pekinese [sic] are from China, and you just know that Cicely – and, by extension, Heyer – did not even think about that for a moment. Then again, “Chu” is a Chinese name, and “san” is Japanese, and Joseph Samuels was neither, so it is all of a 1920s cultural appropriation-y piece, really, isn’t it?

Not that things are all that much better a century or so later, but at least now we know it’s wrong. Heyer – and, from the evidence, the majority of her contemporaries – did not. It’s so hard to stop ourselves from judging the past by the standards of the present, and our aspirations for the future, isn’t it?

But we must. Or we could never read, well, pretty much anything ever again.

“THE LITTLE LADY”

INTRODUCTION

Georgette Heyer’s second short story, “The Little Lady”, was published in The Red Magazine in December 1922. The Red, as it was affectionately known, was, as Mike Ashley observes, originally intended as “an adult all-fiction magazine,” but frequently included stories by boys’ adventure writers. Founded in 1908 and part of “the first wave of all-fiction magazines,” it had a circulation of 90,000 for its twice-monthly publication. The Red Magazine was sometimes described as the “progeny of The Strand magazine” and early editions included stories by Jack London, O. Henry and Rafael Sabatini. It offered readers a wide range of well-written short stories including mystery, adventure, dramatic, and humorous, with about a third of the magazine’s contents being romantic tales.

“The Little Lady” undoubtedly falls into this latter category.

An unusual Heyer story, “The Little Lady” definitely belongs to this group of Heyer’s juvenilia. A whimsical tale of lost love and chance encounters, the story was written in her teens. Its hero, Peter, has quarrelled with his fiancée and left London in a rage. Another of Heyer’s independent young men of means, he finds his way to a country inn, and walking in the woods one day he meets a strange young woman: Bride is elusive, ethereal, elfin, and dressed as though she “had stepped from the pages of Jane Austen.”