Briefing note: Writers’ lives, pt 2

The second part of our critical roundup of the ten most-talked-about literary biographies. Read part 1 here.

Georgette Heyer: Biography of a Bestseller by Jennifer Kloester

This admirable attempt to resurrect the queen of regency romance doesn’t really meet its objective.

When publishers are looking for quotes for the paperback, Daisy Goodwin’s ‘solid and well-researched’ (Sunday Times) will probably have to do.

Rachel Cooke’s Observer review was the most damning:

‘What, I wonder, is the point of this book? Who is it for? According to its jacket, Jennifer Kloester is “the foremost expert on Heyer” (as if the world’s universities were crammed with her competitors, all of them writing PhDs on The Grand Sophy and Regency Buck). What this means in practice is that she tells you everything – I mean everything – about a woman whose life was simply not very interesting … As for the mystery of Heyer’s writing — how it works; why so many intelligent people love it — Kloester simply does not go there, and her book is thus squeezed dry of all the joy it might have had.