Those days at Colindale also revealed her historical short stories and serialised novels that had appeared in Woman’s Journal. Heyer was first published in that magazine in 1935 and over the years she became one of their most popular “selling” names; husbands were known to snatch the magazine from their wives’ hands if Georgette Heyer’s name was on the cover. I loved Woman’s Journal and not only because it had an index which made searching a lot quicker and easier, but also because it published so many well-known authors.

Over the years, I searched more than three thousand physical magazines, sometimes turning pages for eight hours at a time. My final reward for my (some would say obsessive) persistence came on a day when I was back at the main British Library. This is where The Sovereign Magazine was held and it was here that I found Georgette Heyer’s earliest known historical short story: the tragedy entitled “Love”. I’ll always remember the moment when I turned the page and saw the title and with her name beneath it. It was all I could do not to jump for joy right there in the Rare Books and Music Reading Room. I had to suppress a desire to shriek with excitement and did a tiny little jig instead.

My final discovery came from a typewritten list of her many publication which I found in the Heyer Archive held by her son. Here were listed the various foreign serial rights and foreign publications of her novels. Here, too, was a list of her short stories. But most of these were the historical shorts her readers would come to know from her 1960 anthology, Pistols for Two – whereas not a single one of the contemporary short stories I had discovered at the British Library was included on the list. Only one short story title from the 1920s was listed and it was not a title I had found in any of the magazines I had spent so long searching. “‘The Chinese Shawl’ 1924 Tidenskronder” was how the entry read. At the top of the page was written “Danish Serial Rights.” Another clue. I contacted the main library in Copenhagen and the remarkably efficient librarian very kindly effected a search for me and, in what seemed like no time at all, sent me the story. Of course, it was in Danish, which meant finding a translator. I eventually found two and so have two slightly more modern versions of this early Heyer short. It was only this year, and because of my collaborator Rachel Hyland’s brilliance and persistence, that the original story finally came to light in a most unlikely publication.

Of these nine short stories, seven were contemporary shorts published in a single year (September 1922 – October 1923), one was a historical short (November 1923) and one was published in 1925 under Heyer’s pseudonym. Each story tells us something about Georgette Heyer, about her development as a writer, her willingness to experiment, her ear for the language of the day, her attitudes to women and marriage, her attempts to write in different genres and her perception of love and relationships. These stories represent her juvenilia – they are not her best work, but nor are they anything of which to be ashamed. She was writing for money and for experience. She was working out her voice and trying her hand at different styles. These early stories, along with her early novels, helped build Heyer’s writing “muscle”; they were an important part of her evolution as an author. They are also interesting, entertaining stories, reflective of their time and place. Even at twenty, Georgette Heyer was a good writer, and her earliest short stories reveal much of the superb stylist she would become.