Perhaps it’s not surprising that The Masqueraders is one of her rare books in which it rains. The hut had earthen floors and thin grass walls and it must have been hot both inside and out. It’s amazing to think of her working away inside the ‘Manor House’ – her name for her grass hut – writing her manuscript on her lap or at a rudimentary table with a fountain pen. She was separated from her reference books and from the London Library, and yet she still managed to pull off a convincing eighteenth-century setting. It is remarkable to think of Heyer writing The Masqueraders in a grass hut in Africa, thousands of miles away from her previous home in staid Wimbledon. Life in East Africa was unlike anything Georgette had experienced before but the remote location did not stop her writing.

Georgette outside ‘the manor house’, her name for the grass hut that was her home in Africa.

Georgette and Roddy the dog nside the elephant grass fence surrounding their compound in Kyerwa.

If Helen was a cathartic novel, The Masqueraders was a joyful return to the type of book Georgette Heyer would always love to write.

Earlier that year she had finished her contemporary novel, Helen, a book which had helped her overcome the deep grief caused by her father’s unexpected death two years previously. Georgette’s husband, Ronald, was prospecting for tin and often away, so she spent her days writing, going for walks and playing with her Sealyham terrier, Roddy.

On the grassy plains outside rhinoceroses, leopards and roan antelope roamed free. Her home was a hut made of elephant grass built inside a compound surrounded by a tall elephant grass fence. In 1927 Georgette Heyer was living in Kyerwa, a remote part of Tanganyika in East Africa. ‘A sister takes her brother’s sword and the brother uses her fan.’ A joyful return She wrote it while living in a grass hut in Africa.

The first edition jacket of Georgette Heyer’s third eighteenth-century novel.

The masqueraders heyer