We are fortunate to have Margaret Evans Porter as a guest today. A regular visitor to Word Wenches, Margaret is of the same cadre of traditional Regency writers as Loretta, Jo, and me, with her first hardcover Doubleday Regency released in 1988.
Like many traditional Regency writers, Margaret eventually moved into historical romance, but she has also done so much more, including writing non-fiction, raising roses, and recently getting elected to the New Hampshire state legislature. I can’t begin to do justice to all the fascinating things Margaret has done and is doing, so I suggest a visit to her website http://margaretevansporter.com/ and/or her blog: http://margaretevansporter.blogspot.com/
Margaret can write knowledgeably on any number of topics, but for today, she’s going to talk about the inter-relationship of travel and writing. Prepare for a wonderful trip! (Scenic photos all taken by Margaret.)
“Travel is the frivolous part of serious lives, and the serious part of frivolous ones.”—Anne Sophie Swetchine
I was fairly new to this world when I decided to explore it. Before I was a year old I repeatedly grabbed my tiny child’s pocketbook and bolted for the door, crying, “Go bye-bye!” It’s entirely possible that I wanted to go shopping—another addiction of mine—but my parents viewed these incidents as proof I was a born traveller. Just like them.
My grandparents were often in another country—usually but not always the British Isles. My aunt and uncle, academics and authors, were most often in London and Paris. I was pursuing my obvious destiny
when my studies in history and theatre led me to various British universities.
Naturally I married a travel addict—an enabler. About fifteen years ago, my husband based his consultancy in the U.K. He tells me our forthcoming trip there will be his fiftieth. By my reckoning, I accompanied him on more than half of them, but I’m a girl so I don’t keep score!
As writer, travel inspires and informs my novels. It’s an integral part of my process.
As a historian, I’m insatiably curious, compelled to visit places where important things happened and wander the homes in which famous, or infamous, or obscure persons lived and loved. This sort of tourism is no new thing. In the 1690’s the remarkable Celia Fiennes travelled all over England—by horseback, on a sidesaddle—and later published her minute observations and pithy impressions. A century later, road improvements and better carriages resulted in a tourism boom and printers started publishing guidebooks for those who travelled to spas and mountains and lakes and aristocrats’ houses.
As a human being, I experience different aspects of myself when I travel. James Baldwin says it better: “I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.” Henry Miller observed, “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”
As a casual genealogist, I’m sometimes seeking my forebears. Standing at the beautiful medieval baptismal font where family members were christened, locating their dwellings or gravestones, connects me with my own heritage in a uniquely meaningful way.
As reader, I note that place is frequently a dominant feature of English literature. The Forest of Arden. Northanger Abbey. Thornfield Hall. Bleak House. Manderley. Jamaica Inn. So I strive to make my villages, estates, cottages, and townhouses as real for a reader as for me.
Studying novels, we see the ways travel exposes character. E.M. Forster uses Italy to good effect in Room with a View and Where Angels Fear to Tread. Henry James focuses on American ex-pats in Europe. Dickens moves his people up and down and around England, and strands them in London for battering, or bereavement, or betterment.
Georgette Heyer’s Sylvester shows us how revelatory—and hilarious—the travails of travel can be. So does Bill Bryson, in a non-fictional way. The Wenches send their characters on amazing journeys of romantic discovery. As well as sharing their knowledge of Britain, they carry us beyond its shores—to Egypt or Venice (Loretta Chase), France and Italy (Miranda Jarrett). In a favourite Edith Layton story, The Abandoned Bride, the hero lures the heroine onto a Channel packet boat bound for France. To find out why, read the book!
If my spouse is otherwise occupied, I’ll blithely putter about familiar places on my own or brave unfamiliar territory. On a solo research jaunt through villages on the Normandy coast, I successfully changed my money, ordered coffee, bought lunch and a glass of wine, hired taxis, and boarded my return boat in a region where not a soul spoke English.
Is it necessary for an author to do on-site research for a novel? No. Emphatically no. Often, after reading a story set in a place I’ve seen, I contact the author to gush—whereupon I learn that she’d never been there at all, but relied on books and maps and instinct.
Truly, an imagination, a library card, and the internet are the only essential passports. But you already knew that!
In developing my current project, a historical biography, I often rely on Celia Fiennes (and others) who described the England of my characters’ lifetimes. Gone are the formal avenues of trees in St. James’s Park and the aviary in Birdcage Walk. Pall Mall is no longer a fashionable promenade but a heavily trafficked metropolitan thoroughfare. Nowadays London smells of petrol and diesel fumes instead of cookshops and coal smoke and horse droppings. The streets are wider, the songbirds are fewer, and progress has re-formed the banks of the River Thames.
Nor are royal residences immune to change. Fire obliterated Whitehall Palace in 1698—within my story’s time frame—leaving the Banqueting Hall as the only remnant. After its fire, portions of Hampton Court had to be restored—resurrecting original designs of King William and Queen Mary. Celia Fiennes visited twice, and I’ve got other contemporaneous accounts. Much of Windsor Castle was Victorianised. (That's Hampton Court on the left.)
Place is formative, yet I’m mindful that my characters may be typical or atypical of their native area. They might be deeply attached to it or desperate to escape. (Or both—like me, when I wanted to “Go bye-bye!”) Their deepest needs and longings are usually prompted by where they came from and what they experienced there. Place might prove obstructive to a romantic relationship. An alien landscape, a change of climate, will naturally affect our characters. How do they react to their surroundings or cope with them? Do they even notice?
I notice everything. My camera constantly targets architecture, landscape, flora, fauna. I gather up sticks and stones and shells—even seaweed, now floating in water in a glass jar on my bookcase. To augment my visual record and capture less tangible aspects of place, I keep a travel diary, a small spiral-bound notebook that fits in my handbag. An ultra-portable laptop enables me to transcribe research notes, keep in contact with family and friends, check railway timetables and museum openings. Even to blog.
Nowadays I travel mostly to cull facts from primary sources unavailable in the States, tracing the footprints—clearly visible or barely detectable—my characters left upon the historical record. I haunt art galleries and museums and royal residences, studying their faces and those of their contemporaries. I examine artifacts familiar to them, their weaponry and furniture and books and jewellery and clothing.
Whenever possible, I do hands-on research. The hero of The Seducer establishes a textile printing enterprise on the Isle of Man. So I spent hours in the Victoria & Albert Museum with a costume curator and the entire collection of block- and copper-printed linen, complete dresses to small swatches of fabric. The Proposal’s heroine was an artist—the Courtauld Gallery provided sketching exercises. When writing my theatrical Regencies (the giveaway prize!), I spent a lot of time in Bristol’s Theatre Royal, little changed from Georgian times. For one performance we booked seats in an upper tier box, where I learned how exposed one is to the audience. (The table setting is from the Victoria & Albert Museum.)
Occasionally deadlines demand that I actually accomplish writing while I’m away. I remember being in Warsaw, scribbling scenes of my Regency historical while seated in an exhibition hall’s alcove during a noisy, busy music industry conference. Or crafting a book proposal in an upper story flat in Clifton, Bristol, emailing it to my editor, and rewarding myself with a quick trip to Bath, only fifteen minutes away by train.
Travel does have unintended consequences. I went to Slovakia to promote my books and discovered how delightful it was. During my press conference, one reporter asked if I’d incorporate the city of Bratislava into a future novel. I gave the polite positive answer—it was genuine—then wondered how I could. It later occurred to me that the male protagonist of my w-i-p might well stop at Pressburg, as it was known in his time, on his way to Vienna after helping the Emperor wage war against the Turks. (A scene from Bratislava on the left.)
Another advantage to my roamings: additional income whenever magazines or newspapers publish my travel articles and/or photographs. I can thus share my experiences with people who will never read my novels.
Preparing for a journey—which I’m now doing—involves a peculiar alchemy of idealism and pragmatism. As well as detailed planning, I leave gaps of time to be filled by whim or serendipity. While away, I manage to tick my most crucial research boxes while awaiting those inevitable, unexpected research miracles. I concur with Lawrence Block, who says, “Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.” Hasn’t that happened to you?
Travel is also the primary way my husband contributes to the books. He allows my research needs to ordain our itineraries—I select sites, decide the when and the where. He researches transport, purchases the tickets or hires (and drives) the motorcar, reads and unerringly follows the maps, locates our destination. He listens patiently and even seems interested as I babble about a place’s significance to my story and characters.
Whenever he reads the published result of our wanderings, he’ll turn to me and say, “I was transported.” And I know he means it—because he’s actually been there. With me.
What favourite novel brought a specific location to life for you? Do you ever long to visit a place you first discovered in a book? Can you tell whether the author visited the places she writes about? (Without reading the Author’s Notes, that is!)
Links:
About Celia Fiennes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celia_Fiennes
Margaret’s Photo Travelogue
http://margaretevansporter.com/travels.html
Travel Quotations
http://www.itravelnet.com/useful/travelquotations.html
Thanks so much, Margaret!
Margaret is generously giving away a book that contains two of her Signet Regencies, Dangerous Diversions and Toast of the Town. Both have theatrical settings, one featuring an actress heroine and one an opera dancer. I’m hoping that Margaret will return someday to talk about Regency theater, of which she knows much, but for now, a free copy of the double edition will go to a commenter on this blog who posts by midnight Sunday PST.
Mary Jo, dreaming of Slovakia....
By Susan/Miranda
sheathes? John Campbell, the Duke of Argyll, did exactly that in 1708, before a packed House of Lords: “This Certaine instrument called a Quondom, occassioned ye debauching of a great number of Ladies of Qualitie, and young gentlewomen." (There's an example to the right.)
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