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 to my visits there.

On my first visit I was somewhat taken aback by the starkness of the scene outside the station. On the opposite side of the narrow road and standing by itself like an old forgotten relative was a solid brick rectangular building. More prison than library, I thought at the time, unaware of how much affection I would have for it by the time my years of research there ended. Today, the British Library has moved its newspapers and magazines to Yorkshire. In time, I expect everything will be digitized and made available on the internet. Very convenient, of course, but I wouldn’t have missed those long days at Colindale for anything.

The kindness of the staff, the great wooden trolleys stacked with twenty huge bound volumes of magazines, the anticipation of what might lie between the thick cardboard covers, the feel and smell of the pages as I turned them, always hopeful that the next page would reveal the eagerly-sought, cherished Georgette Heyer by-line. I always arrived early, before the reading room opened, and would then wait with other keen researchers in the downstairs cloakroom. A sparse space with just a few chairs and a table and nothing at all to indicate the “cave of wonders” that lay upstairs. It was always magical to me, being at the Newspaper Library.

I visited England nine times in pursuit of information about Georgette Heyer but my time there was always limited. Three full days, five full days, seven at the most was all the time I could allow for the magazine research on any one trip. The staff at Colindale were so kind and very understanding of my situation – an Australian far from home with a clear goal and limited time in which to achieve it, and they always allowed me more than my regulated allowance of four items at one time. They would bring up a huge trolley filled with great bound books – each one holding as many as twelve magazines for me to search.

It was in these that I found “Linckes’ Great Case” and “The Old Maid,” two very different stories written two years apart. “The Old Maid” appeared under the name of “Stella Martin” – the same name under which Heyer had published her third novel, The Transformation of Philip Jettan. At first I wasn’t sure if the story was hers – after all, there could be another Stella Martin writing short stories for the magazines – but then I read the story. Definitely Heyer’s. So many things in it resonated and today it remains one of my favourites of hers. In fact, I find it nearly impossible to separate Heyer from Helen, the story’s main protagonist.