The Toll-Gate - Georgette Heyer

Georgette Heyer was born on August 16, 1902 at Wimbledon, London. She was an amazingly prolific writer who created the Regency England genre of romance novels. It was as a story for her brother Boris that she first wrote The Black Moth. Her father, impressed with his daughter's imagination, suggested that she prepare it to be published, which it was by Constable in 1921 when she was only nineteen. Having scored an instant success with The Black Moth at the age of nineteen under her own name, Georgette Heyer, she experimented with a pseudonym, Stella Martin, for her third book, published by Mills & Boon. She continued writing and in 1925 she married Ronald Rougier, a mining engineer. After reasonable but not spectacular sales from her first few books the instant success of These Old Shades in 1926 brought her a solid source of income which was very necessary at the time, the family relying to a large extent on the income from Georgette Heyer's writing. When she died, at seventy-one, she had fifty-one titles in print in hard covers and paperback, and had been translated into at least ten languages. Georgette Heyer died on 4th July, 1974.