Royal Studies Journal (Dec 2024)
Royal Biography Between the Lines: Georgette Heyer’s Regency Romances and the Life of Princess Charlotte of Wales (1796-1817).
Abstract
This article considers the topic of writing royal lives from an interdisciplinary perspective which embraces questions of popular history and particularly historical fiction. Georgette Heyer (1902-1974) was a highly successful novelist of the twentieth century whose large oeuvre of historical fiction remains popular and in print to this day. While her name has become synonymous with lightweight historical romantic fiction, particularly set in Regency England, Heyer was a committed researcher with frustrated ambitions to be recognised as a more serious historical writer but desire for financial security as well as the commercial instinct of her publishers pressured her to focus her energies on regular productions of her popular romantic novels. However, it will be argued here that an abandoned project to write a biography of Princess Charlotte of Wales found an outlet in an almost paratextual biography between mentions in several of Heyer’s Regency Romances and especially in references, direct and indirect in her 1961 novel A Civil Contract. It will be argued that this case study should encourage more analysis of historical fictions in royal studies, but particularly that it could provide an inspirational framework for creative practice for scholars in the field seeking to write royal lives as novels in a format with potential for high impact and commercial appeal.
