I’m not actually certain when I read my first Georgette Heyer. I know it was her anthology of Regency short stories, Pistols for Two, because I vividly remembered both the cover and several of the plot lines decades later, but I must have read it before the age of twelve, because the memories are inseparably connected to a specific armchair that didn’t survive much past that. I also entered a tomboy phase about then that precluded my even entertaining the thought of such drivel as historical romance. But inevitably my tomboy phase ended and I swung to the other side of the pendulum, yearning for romance. In my inexperience, I…