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Contents ( 80)
  1. CONTENTS
  2. ACTING ON IMPULSE
  3. CONTENTS
  4. INTRODUCTION
  5. “A PROPOSAL TO CICELY”
  6. INTRODUCTION
  7. A PROPOSAL TO CICELY
  8. THE END
  9. READING “A PROPOSAL TO CICELY”
  10. “THE LITTLE LADY”
  11. INTRODUCTION
  12. THE LITTLE LADY
  13. I.
  14. II.
  15. III.
  16. THE END
  17. READING “THE LITTLE LADY”
  18. “LINCKES’ GREAT CASE”
  19. INTRODUCTION
  20. LINCKES’ GREAT CASE
  21. I.
  22. II.
  23. III.
  24. IV.
  25. V.
  26. VI.
  27. VII.
  28. THE END
  29. READING “LINCKES’ GREAT CASE”
  30. “THE BULLDOG AND THE BEAST”
  31. INTRODUCTION
  32. THE BULLDOG AND THE BEAST
  33. THE END
  34. READING “THE BULLDOG AND THE BEAST”
  35. “ACTING ON IMPULSE”
  36. INTRODUCTION
  37. ACTING ON IMPULSE
  38. I.
  39. II.
  40. III.
  41. IV.
  42. THE END
  43. READING “ACTING ON IMPULSE”
  44. “WHOSE FAULT WAS IT?”
  45. INTRODUCTION
  46. WHOSE FAULT WAS IT?
  47. THE END
  48. READING “WHOSE FAULT WAS IT?”
  49. “THE CHINESE SHAWL”
  50. INTRODUCTION
  51. CONT
  52. THE CHINESE SHAWL
  53. I.
  54. II.
  55. III.
  56. IV.
  57. V.
  58. VI.
  59. VII.
  60. VIII.
  61. THE END
  62. READING “THE CHINESE SHAWL”
  63. “THE OLD MAID”
  64. INTRODUCTION
  65. THE OLD MAID
  66. THE END
  67. READING “THE OLD MAID”
  68. “LOVE”
  69. INTRODUCTION
  70. LOVE
  71. I.
  72. II.
  73. III.
  74. THE END
  75. READING “LOVE”
  76. THE SEARCH FOR “ON SUCH A NIGHT”
  77. GEORGETTE HEYER’S BIBLIOGRAPHY
  78. FURTHER READING
  79. COMING SOON!
  80. OCTOBER 29, 2019

“Yes, thank you. Do you mind letting me go now?”

“I do,” he said. Then the laughter left his voice, and he drew her nearer. “Helen, all these years I’ve longed for you. Will you marry me now?”

“No, no, no! If I hadn’t thrown myself at your head—”

“Well?”

“You —wouldn’t have—thought of—marrying me!”

“If you call this throwing yourself at my head—”

“But I did! Anyway, I won’t marry you!”

“Dear idiot, if you’d kept up that elegancy you certainly wouldn’t have married me. I wasn’t having any. Didn’t you notice that?”

“Oh Maurice, you brute!”

Then she could not say anything more for quite some time, because the breath was literally crushed out of her. And presently, holding her tightly against his shoulder, Maurice asked:

“Helen, will you, or will you not marry me?”

Helen’s voice quivered irrepressibly.

“May as well,” she said.

IT was close on midnight when Anne and her husband heard a car scrunching over the gravel drive. They went out at once, in time to see Helen jump out of an aged Ford. Her hat was over one eye, her face and hands were smeared with car-grease, and she had lost her gloves. Behind her came Maurice, with a broad grin.

“Hullo!” said Helen. “We broke down. Towed the car to Littleharbour, and left it.”

“Helen, your face!” wailed Anne.

“My face,” said Helen cheerfully. “The game’s up.”

Anne looked quickly from one to the other, then held out her hands.

“You dears!” she said. “When’s it going to be?”

“As soon as possible,” Maurice answered. “We’re buying the house, and we shall probably breed Airedales.”

“And I am not going to be beautiful anymore,” said Helen blissfully.

THE END

READING “THE OLD MAID”

None of Heyer’s contemporary works is quite as indicative of her state of mind at this particular time of her life as is “The Old Maid.” At the ripe old age of twenty-three she was clearly terrified of living alone, of being overlooked and left on “the shelf”; this story shows us Heyer looking deep into the abyss of singledom and finding it unacceptable. She fast-forwards her writerly life, Ghost of Christmas Future-style, and sees what shifts she will be driven to if she continues on as she is, striving for literary greatness while turning down a perfectly eligible proposal from a man who has long carried a torch for her, in all her introverted eccentricity.

Heyer gazes ahead and sees that years later, having become a spinster, she’ll have to get a makeover and put on airs and let a chauffeur drive her car, and all because she was the “toast” of literary London and didn’t want to go to Africa to follow her man.

As it happens, Heyer eventually did end up going to Africa to follow her man, of which we are most brutally assured by her frankly upsetting non-fiction article “The Horned Beast of Africa,” which was published in London newspaper The Sphere in June 1929. She and her husband Ronald – whom she met in 1920 and married in 1925 – had been living in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), and mining engineer Ronald had also become something of a big game hunter, taking down black rhinoceros by the seeming dozen. Heyer describes his expertise with a nonchalant glee which was very much of its time – though we’ve all seen Beatrice at the Dinner and those shots of various plutocrats; people still do such things, after all – and one can’t help but think of Helen King-Eyre, and what she had to endure in her Sliding Doors version of the future, in order to not be an old maid until she was so positively ancient at thirty-six.