Word Wenches

Becoming a Regency Woman?

by Mary Jo

I noticed this juicy question on the Topic List our Whipmistress maintains, and decided it was a perfect choice for a blog by a Wench with more opinions than time. <g>  Maureen Emmons asked, “I am wondering what you would have to change about yourself to fit into the historical time period that you are currently writing in?”

Let me count the ways!  To begin with, I’d probably be dead and the issue would be moot.  I’m told that as an infant, I had pneumonia and the doctor came to the house and gave me penicillin. Since there were no antibiotics in the Regency, I might well have become just another example of infant mortality.  (Historical note: there were some folk medicine practitioners who used a gloopy mixture involving moldy bread which could have been a de facto version of penicillin, but this wasn’t a widespread treatment.) 

Assuming I didn’t die in the cradle in the late 18th century, who else would I have to change to be a Regency lady?  For starters, I’d have to give up a whole lot of independence, not to mention that distressing tendency I had as a child to want to prove I was smarter than any of the boys in the class.  “Anything you can do, I can do better.” 

I’m sure that there have always been females who have known they were the equal or superiors of the males in the vicinity—and even in the 21st century, we get grief for it.  Competition is so unladylike. 

There were independent, self-supporting women in the Regency.  There have been in all eras.   But usually that path was from necessity, not choice.  Through the centuries, women have become alewives or laundresses or taken on other trades.  Not many became self-supporting writers as I have.  (Actually, that’s rare even now, but at least it’s not unthinkable.) 

Historically, marriage was an economic partnership, with each party contributing essential services.  Most often this took the form of the husband working to put food on the table and a roof over the family heads, either through subsistence farming or wages while the wife bore children, cooked, cleaned, ran the household, and cared for anyone who needed care. 

Things have not entirely changed—it’s still a model that works well.  But now we have many more choices.  In the Regency, the choices I’ve made for my current life would have been highly unlikely.  Instead of going to school and taking academic courses, I’d have had to spend my late adolescence surveying the eligible local men to decide which would be the best bet as a husband—someone who would take good care of me and the children I hoped to have, and was also someone I liked well enough to live with. 

This was a HUGE decision.  In the Regency, if you married someone you were mated for life.  Occasionally there were legal separations, and in a bad marriage, death probably started looking like a decent option.  But there were a bare handful of divorces, since it took an act of Parliament (and a lot of money) to get a divorce. 

What would I have to change in order to fit into daily life?  For one thing, I’d have to get used to different clothes, such as wearing skirts all the time.  From an anthropological point of view, dress style tends to follow climate.  In very cold areas, everyone tends to wear trousers—think Eskimos.  In very hot areas, everyone tends to wear some form of skirt.  Think the sarongs and loose robes of Asia, or the sometimes minimalist clothing of equatorial Africa. 

In temperate zones clothing tends to follow lifestyle.  Men who were out and about in the world, riding, working the farm, etc, wore trousers.  Women, with a more home centered life, wore skirts because homes were warmer than fields.  These practical customs became enshrined as something next door to divine law:  It was shocking, SHOCKING!, for females to wear trousers, and even worse for men to wear skirts.  (Someone, probably Jo, could write a lovely blog about how dressing in drag is considered the height of British male humor, but that’s another topic.  <g>)

These days, women are as likely to be out and about as men, so many of us wear trousers most of the time.  What was shocking in ‘30s Hollywood—think Marlene Dietrich and Katharine Hepburn in their trousers—became a way of life starting in the 1960s and 1970s.  I’m old enough to remember the dress codes that were common.  Offices and restaurants where women had to wear dresses all the time.  Ugh! 

To some extent, I’m weather oriented about dress—in the heat of summer, I often wear long, loose skirts.  But 98% of the time (at a conservative estimate), I wear trousers, and I’d hate to give up that freedom.

Assuming I could adjust to living a quiet, home centered Regency life, I’d still have to learn to wear the clothes.  Properly made stays aren’t uncomfortable, but they do require different movements.  When Wenchling Nina wore accurate Regency dress for a historical weekend, she found that her correct corset meant that she had no upper body strength: she couldn’t even lift a small suitcase out of the trunk of her car.  She had to learn a new way of moving that was forced on her by her clothing.  This included not being able to lift her arms even as high as her shoulders. 

For modern women who are used to freedom of moment, this would be a dramatic change.  <mjp picturing herself lying on the floor to coax a cat out from under the sofa. Would that be possible in Regency garb?  Difficult, at the least!) 

What about eating?  That I can actually address from experience, since I lived in England for two years in the 70s, and that gave me a sense of lived closer to the natural cycle.  Refrigerators were often tiny, what we call office size, if houses had them at all.  In the cool English climate, food didn’t spoil quickly, and besides, women usually went to the shops for food several times a week, even daily. 

Most interestingly, the English ate much closer to the seasonal calendar.  In the U.S., most produce was (and is) available any time of the year.  The tomatoes might bounce like rubber balls and the strawberries have no flavor, but you can buy them in December.  In England, you only ate strawberries for the few weeks in early summer when they were in season—but you really appreciated them, and the flavor was fabulous.  All this would be even more true during the Regency.

In the nature of things, Regency people were “locavores”—people who ate food produced locally and seasonally.  That could be a whole blog in itself.  (No orange juice!  No olive oil!  But lots of gooseberries in season. 

I could prattle on indefinitely, but shall control myself for today.  Maybe I’ll come back to this topic another day. But for now—Maureen, I owe you a book!  If you go to the book list pages of my website, www.maryjoputney.com, you can look for a book of mine you might enjoy.  If it’s in mass market and I have sufficient copies, I’ll sign and send.  (You can e-mail me from the contact link on my website.)

Finally, since many of you are very knowledgeable about the Regency—what aspects of your life now would have to change to be a Regency woman?  What would be hardest—and would anything be easy?!!

Mary Jo

And the Wieners Are ...

We have 10 (ten, count 'em!) winners this week!

Our first winner is Talpianna, who left a comment on Mary Jo's Home Sweet Home post.  As a result, she won a copy of Mary Jo's Silk and Shadows.  Congratulations, Talpianna!

Our next 9 winners won Loretta Chase books for participating in the Dating Game post.  (See answers, below.)  Loretta generously decided to award books to all who participated, even those who Googled the quotes.  Since she didn't actually specify, "No Googling," it seems unfair to disqualify them--including those who disqualified themselves. So here are the winners:

Buggalugs
Jane George
Anne Gracie
Maya Missani
Tiffany
Jenny Haddon
Theo
Ingrid
Maria

Congratulations, to all 9 of Loretta's winners!  Please take a moment to visit Loretta's Booklist page and choose your book.  All are available except Three Weddings & a Kiss, The Last Hellion, and the Christmas Collection.  Once you've made your choice, please let Loretta or me know.  Ingrid and Maria, we don't have your e-mail address, so if you read this, please contact us off-list.

Now, are you curious about the answers to Loretta's little test?  If you are, just scroll down and read the next post.

Dating Game--the answers

The correct answers to the Dating Game are:

1.  Old  (19th C, Jane Austen, Persuasion)
2.  Old  (17th C, Pepys, his diary)
3.  Old  (19th C, Dickens,  Dombey & Son)
4.  New  (21st C, Susan Holloway Scott, Royal Harlot)
5.  Old  (19th C, Lord Byron, Letters & Journals)
6.  New  (21st C, Loretta Chase, Lord Perfect)
7.  Old  (19th C, George Eliot, Middlemarch)
8.  New  (20th C, Patrick O’Brian, The Ionian Mission)
9.  New  (20th C, Georgette Heyer, An Infamous Army)
10.  New  (20th C, P.G. Wodehouse, Something Fresh)

Dating Game

From Loretta:

I’ve just spent a few days playing verbal Dodgeball with the ladies at Romance Novel TV.  I was this week’s Mystery Author.  It’s a sort of 20 Questions game they play.  It's fun and challenging.  They ask questions and the author tries to give answers that answer without giving away who she is.  It ain’t easy, believe me.  These readers are sharp, and there were times where I felt as though I was standing against a big board with darts landing a gnat’s nose hair away from tender flesh.

The Q & A goes on Mon-Wed.  On Thursday the Mystery Author’s identity is revealed.  So as of today I am all revealed and can tell you about it, and send you over to admire their sleuthing skills and my powers of deception.  The rest of the blog is cool, too, so check it out. 

However, after playing mind games all week, and tiring out my brain in a major way, I’ve decided to let you do some work.  We’re going to play a game.  Since you already know who I am, we can skip that one.

This is a Dating Game.  Specifically, date the verbiage.

A while back we had a guest blogger talking about old and new language, and I’ve had some discussions elsewhere about what sounds modern & what doesn’t & how some very old words strike some readers as “too modern” for a Regency era story. 

So I wondered how hard it was to tell when a book had been written.  Is it easy to distinguish between say, an excerpt from Jane Austen and one from Georgette Heyer?  Can something written in the early part of the 20th century seem as though it was written in the 21st?

Below are are some quotations.  You don’t have to guess the author.  All you need to do is guess whether it’s old or new.  But the more you narrow things down, the more credit you get.

Old would be something written in the 19th century or earlier.
New would be something written in the 20th or 21st century.
Bonus points for guessing the century correctly.
Bonus bonus points for guessing the author, too.

Two of the highest scorers will win signed copies of my books.

Now put on your thinking caps, because I tried to make these fiendishly difficult. (I honed those skills over at Romance Novel TV.)

1.   Personal size and mental sorrow have certainly no necessary proportions.  A large bulky figure has as good a right to be in deep affliction, as the most graceful set of limbs in the world.  But fair or not fair, there are unbecoming conjunctions...

2. There are factions (private ones at Court) about Madam Palmer; but what it is about I know not. But it is something about the King’s favour to her now that the Queen is coming.

3. ...ragged tenements, fragments of unfinished walls and arches, and piles of scaffolding, and wildernesses of bricks, and giant forms of cranes, and tripods straddling above nothing.

4. The girl’s flushed face was as round as the oranges in the willow basket on her hip as she grinned up at us from the theatre’s pit.  Every such chit in the place would come parade below the royal box, flaunting their overripe breasts like more oranges for sale...

5. So that if I come away with a stiletto in my gizzard some fine afternoon...

6. While not as busy as it would be during the daylight hours, the area was by no means deserted.  The waterman still carried buckets to the hackneys lined up at the coach stand.  Some soldiers gossiped under a street lamp.  A milk-woman carried her empty pails back toward Knightsbridge.  The tollgate keeper would continue to work through the night.

7. Why not?  A man’s mind--what there is of it--has always the advantage of being masculine.

8. “It seems that he forgot the discretion his legal advisers urged him to observe, and it seems to them than an absence from the country is now essential for a while.  I forget the details--mayhem, attorneys flying out of a two-pair-of-stairs window, glass damaged to the extent of several pounds, clerks put in fear of their lives, blasphemous words, a breach of the King’s peace.”

9.  “Oh!  People never say nice things about me.  What have you been told?”
       “That you were beautiful.”
       “And?”
       “And disastrous.”

10.  Nature had equipped him with a mind so admirably constructed for withstanding the disagreeableness of life that, if an unpleasant thought entered it, it passed out again a moment later.

While you work on it, I'll be staring out of the window with Francesca, looking for trouble.

Need to know

Jo here, with a book about to reach the shelves, which means she's not thinking about much else. :)

So I thought I'd try to remember the research steps for A Lady's Secret.

Because I write series, I have a fairly wide and deep knowledge base to begin with, but of course things come up that I have to research -- the things on a need to know basis. As I said last time, I didn't expect A Lady's Secret to start in France. I hadn't researched everyday life in Georgian France and now I needed to know.

Logistics said the book had to start a few days away from England, and Abbeville came to mind. The reason Abbeville came to mind is because when one crosses from Dover to Calais and heads toward Paris, you're quite likely to spend a night in Abbeville. Been there, done that, and so, it seems, have most travelers through the ages.

It was at this point that I discovered travel books from the 18th century  on Google Books that gave me info I needed, but I've written about them before. I thought that this time I'd mention some of the things that didn't end up in the book, because our judgment on what to leave out is as important as our judgement about what to include.

(If you're a writer, what's the juiciest bit you've had to leave out because it just didn't fit the story?)

The highways were owned and administered by the French crown and strictly regulated. They were quite safe because the penalties for any infraction were severe. I could have shared the complex rules about how many horses you were required to hire, depending on the number of wheels on the carriage and the number of occupants, but I restrained myself. The rules seemed designed to spare the horses abuse, which seems like a good thing.

It was, apparently, essential to take ones own knife, fork, and spoon, for those provided by the French hostelries were completely inadequate. It sounds as if they had something like a spork -- a dished fork -- but it's unclear. The knives were blunt and the blades so thin they bent. Or so the advice went. I decided that played no useful part in my story.

That's the benchmark, you see -- does it contribute to the story? I couldn't see how to make a good story incident out of it, so I left it out. I'm sure Robin travels with excellent cutlery.

(Oh dear, in looking for a website to point to, I came across an 18th century time sink. The 18th century reading room.  Also The Casanova Tour , which seems to be a description of 18th century travel through the experiences of Casanova, which is particularly relevant as you'll see later.)

I felt I had to include the fact that most post houses only provided horses and not food and lodging because Robin and Petra stop at one such place and they're hungry. To have them eat as if that was the norm offended my sense of reality, so I had to make a little point of it.

It does seem a strange state of affairs, however. The post-keepers could have made a nice little income from it, and travelers complain that delays left them having to travel much later than they intended in order to find a place to stay.

There was also strange stuff about the bills. Costs had to be settled on arrival at an inn, or the traveler could face a huge bill with no way to contest it.

But let's move on from travel. I also had to figure out routes. Calais to Dover was the obvious one, but what about Boulogne, often used now? It's a longer Channel crossing, but less time on the road. As they want to leave France as soon as possible, they choose Boulogne, even though it wasn't as busy or good a port.

Living in the minds of my characters -- or rather, Robin at this point, as he knows the routes -- I realize that crossing to Dover makes them sitting ducks for the bad guys, so I have to see where else they could go, and how. It's only a minor spoiler to say I spent a lot of time researching Folkestone for very few words, but I needed to know.

Oh, I forgot to mention all the research I did on Italian convents, especially those in Milan, which was quite fascinating and provided good background, but very few words. Ah, if we could only included all our research, writing a novel would be easy! Dull for the reader, but easy to reach the word count. But they really were crammed with widows and unmarried ladies of the higher classes, who could rarely find husbands. Also, did you know that even up till recent times some nuns' headdresses distorted the skull and caused headaches and other problems? Not saying this one is an example, but those tight, starched bands could do damage.

I had already been reading about Teresa Cornelys, and as she was a natural fit for an Italian heroine I hoped to make her a major player, but alas that didn't work with the story. I didn't even get to tell the nifty story of her and Casanova.

You want the story? Good! When young, Teresa Imer, as she was in Venice when she was beginning her career as an opera singer, had a love affair with the young Casanova and bore a daughter. He'd gone on his adventures and knew nothing of it. She married another, then later another, and after an almost unbelievable sequence of events ended up hosting Venetian assemblies in a grand house in Soho that became the model that Almack's made successful. Teresa, alas, didn't, and though she ruled London for a few years, she was always in debt.

This picture is of a musical evening at Madam Cornelys' house. You can see a bigger version by clicking here.

Enter Casanova, come to enjoy London. Teresa immediately wants a loan. Probably as part of this, she decides to convince him that her daughter Sophia was his. Being Teresa Cornelys, however, she simply confronts him with the girl in public when he has no choice but to acknowledge her because they're so alike. She then sends Sophie on begging missions.

The plan backfires somewhat, however, as he decides that Teresa's house is not suitable and places her in a convent boarding school. Time for me to gulp. There are no convent boarding schools in England, which is a minor point in my book!

Turns out there was, sort of. A group of women lived  in Hammersmith (maybe, the location switches in different versions) it a vaguely nuns-like way and wearing something like a habit. They supported themselves by running a school for a few girls.

I really wanted to work this into A Lady's Secret because it's a delicious tid-bit, but though I managed it, it ended up on the cutting room floor because it was part of a section that didn't move the story along. When I cut it out, the rest of the book stood without a quiver. That's the real test. If it can be cut without making a difference, it has to go.

I'm sure there were many other plunges into the research books along the way -- there always are! -- but that's enough for now.

Do you notice information dumps in books, and do they bother you?

Which do you think is most common these days -- too much information in historicals or too little?

A Lady's Secret might be on the shelves this weekend. It should certainly be there by Tuesday. Romantic Times describes it as a "delightful, delicious gem of a book." Chapter one is here.

And, of course, the two-for reissue of trad regencies is also out soon, and you can read the openings of those from this page.

Happy spring!

Jo :)

Gender Defender

By Susan/Miranda

If the book you’re reading now didn’t have an author’s name on the cover, could you tell if it was written by a woman, or a man?

This is a heated question in my house, with both a male and a female reader (aka my DH and me) ready to jump into the fray.  I maintain that in too many books written by men, the female characters are perfunctory stereotypes at best, placekeepers of the worst sort: the hero’s overbearing mother, his girlfriend of the moment, his young daughter in jeopardy, the sweet old lady downstairs who’s murdered, the vixen of a villainess. 

We’re not just discussing manly genre books (otherwise locally known as “Dad’s boom-booms”), either. There are plenty of well-regarded male writers, past and present, who seem to falter when it comes to creating women worthy of their heroes.  Too often there’s a hollowness to the heroine, a lack of emotional depth that, as a female reader, I instantly sense.  Somehow these women just don’t behave right.

But turn-around’s fair play, and my DH says exactly the same thing about many of the books I like by women authors (including, alas, a number of my writer-friends).  He’ll concede that the writing’s first-rate, the plot’s well-paced, the research is everything you’d want to support the story, but the hero –– well, he has no use at all for the heroes.  He claims they’re too sensitive, too thoughtful, too reflective, too downright talky, to be real.  Worse, he says that the harder a female writer tries to write a tough-guy, the more false the poor shmoo will ring to a male readers ears.

As a writer, I know it’s not easy to create ANY character, regardless of the gender.  I’ve lived my whole life among menfolk, but I still can’t begin to know all the laws of their particular planet.  Whenever (and writing romance, you know it’s not often) I hear from a male reader, praising something that one of my heros did or thought, I’m overjoyed, and relieved, too.  It’s a tricky challenge to make work.  One of the things I like best about writing novels  in the first person (like King's Favorite and Duchess) is that I can stay inside my heroine’s head, and leave the hero to think whatever “Man Show” thoughts he may choose, unassisted by me.

But back to my reader-role.  I’ll hasten to say that this gender-bias doesn’t hold true for every book.  There ARE plenty of wonderful male characters written by women, and women written by men.   But there are also too many of the other kind to be ignored. 

I’m not talking about women writing behind a male pseudonym –– Georges-Sand-syndrome –– to gain respect from the literary establishment.  Though, sadly, things haven’t changed that much since Marianne’s time, either, not if you count the number of favorable reviews for male-written books in the Sunday New York Times Review of Books versus the number by women-writers. If you’re a woman writing macho-commando books, you still better abbreviate your name into genderless initials if you want to sell in an equally-macho market, just as the handful of male romance writers publish their love stories under female pen-names.

No, I’m speaking as reader expressing certain, ahem, frustrations.  Would Inman have fought through so much to return home only to die on his doorstep if Cold Mountain had been written by a woman?  Wouldn’t a woman writer have given the namesake of Memoirs of Geisha a bit more emotional depth to balance out the fascinating history that filled the rest of the book?  Couldn’t Horatio Hornblower have found true love with a woman who was less of a man than the weather-beaten Lady Barbara?  And wasn’t there some way that  Love Story could have remained a love story without killing off poor Jenny and leaving Oliver so pathetically adrift?                                                                                                            

What about you?  Have you ever read a book where the writer betrayed her or his own gender by a lack of empathy or understanding for the characters playing on the other team?  Have you ever wondered how differently a book would have been written by a man –– or a woman?  Or do you think this is all a bunch o’ hooey, and there’s no difference at all?

Wanda McCaddon, Honorary Word Wench!

The Wenches would like to thank Wanda McCaddon for her fascinating interview about audiobook narration. Here at Wenches, we shower our guests with thanks and virtual gifts and declare them Honorary Word Wenches (HWW). And here's the dream gift we'd wish for you...

This gorgeous, glossy red antique Edison Phonograph, first manufactured in 1877.

If you were to record an audiobook for Jane Eyre or Pride and Prejudice in 1877, you'd have to speak into the open end of the projecting horn. The sound would go down the tube, vibrate a glass piece, and stir a stylus inside the machine to trace the sound patterns onto a revolving wax disc or cylinder. The disc could be played back later on a phonograph machine.

Thank you, Wanda, Honorary Word Wench!

Here's an article in the New York Times about Edison's recording machine, for the very curious:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=980CE5D8133AF933A05752C1A9659C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

Home, Sweet Home

by Mary Jo

“Home” is not exactly an unexplored concept.  It’s pondered in poetry, where Robert Frost famously said, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in."

Music—everything from Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony, with its “Going Home Theme,” to “I’ll be Home for Christmas.” 

It’s also a significant theme in fiction, perhaps in romance more than most.  We write about love, after all—finding the “home of the heart.” 

Often that’s reflected in finding a physical home as well.  In LaVyrle Spencer’s wonderful Morning Glory, the hero, convict Will Parker, has always been desperately alone and wants nothing more than to have a family of his own.  (He finds it with widowed Elly and her boys in pre-WWII Georgia.) 

Certainly the desire to find a home is prominent in my own stories.  The theme is probably most explicit in Silk and Shadows, which starts with the words “He called himself Peregrine, the wanderer, and he came to London for revenge.”  The story ends when the heroine says, “Welcome home, wanderer, welcome home.”  (Subtlety has never been my strong point. <g>)

I’d say that most of my books have that theme of finding a home that’s both a place and person, and I think this is true of most romance writers.  We write about people finding happiness, after all, and home is often a large part of that. 

But what is “home?”  I started thinking about the topic (resulting in this blog) after a discussion on a writers’ loop. 

To start with, home is a physical place, and some people are born in the wrong place.  Several eons ago I read a YA novel where two high school classes, one in Kansas and one in Washington State, do a swap to each other’s states.  One of the Kansan protagonists saw the sea and walked straight into it up to her knees.  All her life, she’d been missing sand and fog and sea gulls and she hadn’t known it.  She found where she was going to move when she got out of school.

The same girl was startled when one of  the boys from the Washington class was entranced by Kansas.  The sunshine, the golden fields, the vast blue dome of the sky—they spoke to him.  He decide to apply to the University of Kansas.  He’d found his home. 

Physical place makes a huge difference, but even a great place isn’t necessarily right all the time.  I love the deserts and mountains of the Southwest.  Love to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there—I’d miss the greenery and it’s too far from the ocean.  The rolling hills of my native Western New York are beautiful, but snow is only fun for a while.  Then it gets tedious.  It’s not surprising how many snowbirds from that area head south for the winter. 

Home can be about work.  Some jobs can be done anywhere, but others tie people to particular places.  If you want to work in tv or movie production, you probably need to be in Southern California.  If you want to be an editor for one of the big publishers, that probably means New York.  And if you want to be a Supreme Court Justice or member of Congress, you’ll be spending a lot of the year in Washington, DC.  And through work, we often create strong friendships.  (A writer’s professional peers are scattered all over the place, but cyberspace becomes the place where we meet and socialize.)

Home is also about society and culture.  A friend of a friend always complained about the U. S.  She wasn’t happy to be an American.  After college she went to England, and found that she’d come home.  She has since acquired a British accent, husband, and family, and is happy with all of them. 

Even more than the general culture, of course, home is about the people.  Our nearest and dearest, both family and our friends.  The latter often become the family we choose in addition to our blood family.  (And sometimes the families we choose suit us better than the ones we’re born into, but that’s a whole ‘nother topic.)

Travel is wonderful, but it does complicate the question of where home is.  I sometimes envy people who grow up in one place and never feel the least need to leave.  Friends and family are right there, and their roots fun very deep.  Baltimore is like that. 

But for someone who has lived in several places, it gets harder.  “How ya going to keep those boys down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree?” 

Children who move around a lot when they’re young, such as military kids, end up with too many choices.  Consider a girl who was born in Maine and loved the clean air and beautiful landscape.  Later her family moves to Berlin, and she loveds the European culture and sense of antiquity.  Then on to California—hot sun, dramatic desert and mountains and beaches, a laidback culture with lots of diversity.  Maybe she goes to college in New York City and loves the excitement and vast cultural opportunities.  And maybe she has grandparents in Maryland and Kentucky. 

So where is home?  Where would she live if she could choose any place she wants?  Wherever she lives, she’ll probably be missing things about other places.  I’d say the solution is to take a lot of vacations. <g> 

For me, I think home is most strongly connected to friends and family.  But it’s also place.  I love Maryland’s four seasons and I like having lived in this neighborhood long enough to know what stores to visit, what places to avoid during rush hour. 

Think of how hard it is to leave home for another country, even when it seems like the best decision.  (The famous painting, "The Last of England" by Ford Madox Brown, captures the grief of a couple leaving family, friends, and everything they've ever known for another country.)

What about you?  What means home to you?  And if you could live anywhere you want—where would that be?  And why?

In reading terms—do you like to see your romances end with the couple strongly connected to a particular place?  Or are you okay with them taking off to the wild blue yonder for new adventures as long as they’re together? 

Since this the topic is home, I’ll give away a copy of Silk and Shadows to someone who comments between now and midnight Sunday. 

And may your home always be a happy one—

Mary Jo (on the 22nd anniversary of starting her first book)

PS: Please excuse the run on paragraphs.  Typepad is in one of its hissy fit moods where it refuses to let me put spaces between. 

More Gifts for Finnish Minna, Queen for a Day

Minna has provided us with some great sites to explore.  Do you think we could award her with an aurora borealis for an evening?  If you go to this link:

http://virtual.finland.fi/Picture_Book/

you can see a gorgeous slide show of auroras, but I can only put this tiny glimmer  on here:

and next, perhaps the most fantastic contemporary tea/coffee set I've ever laid eyes on, and I'm a connoissieur of tea sets:

http://virtual.finland.fi/Arts_Entertainment/

I can't translate the websites to see if the Kuutar and other Kalevala jewels:
http://images.google.fi/images?gbv=2&hl=fi&q=kalevala+koru+kuutar&btnG=Etsi+kuvia

are suitable for our queen, but this image is gorgeous enough to count no matter what it's made of:

And it seems our Queen has her eye on a particular hunk she would like delivered to her  castle.  I can't insert videos in here, but the music is lovely and the guy...  see for yourself:
Bogart Co. - Princess
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9nJq4fi5f8

And I think this video will fascinate some of my Mystic Isle readers.  Shall we send this group to Windsor to entertain for the evening?  Can't duplicate the brilliant setting, but the group and the music ought to liven that stuffy hall: Indica: Vuorien taa
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05mAzx56jQ4

Aww, and Minna even remembered my patron saint with this truly haunting duet from one of my favorite shows, in honor of St Pat's Day:
Riverdance song duet
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgDhxOC5g48

You're definitely a jewel, Minna, thank you!

Queen Wench for a Day!

Minna 's name has been drawn as Queen Wench for Today!  Congratulations, Minna, and in your honor, we're granting you the virtual use of Queen Victoria's robes for today.

In honor of St Pat's Day, we thought you might enjoy exploring an Irish castle...to be virtually yours for this day.

Home of the Earls of Longford for 350 years, it contains history, furnishings, and architecture covering three centuries.  That should take you some time to putter around!

And exploring anything that large will certainly work up an appetite, so we thought a quick flight to England and a lovely dinner for a few of your close friends and family at Windsor might be appropriate this evening.  Each of the trusses is handmade and the wood comes from 300 green oak trees cut from the royal grounds.  Say hi to the Queen should you meet her in the halls!

Nina has already stopped by and left a gorgeous ring fit for a queen:

and this splendid set of Sevres vases which I would love to borrow when you're done with them:

 

I'll check back here regularly through the day, so if any readers would like to leave Minna a few virtual gifts, I'll post them throughout the day.  Minna, I'd love to post a photo of you (or your pets or any other favorite object <G>) on the blog, but you'd have to give me a computer link to it so I can retrieve it.  If you don't have a website, you could email an image to [email protected] .  Any other virtula gifts can be mailed that way as well if you don't have a web link.

Have fun!

PS: I'm amending this after discovering a number of our wenchly readers have material chosen by Bookends Literary Agency in their opening paragraph contest.  Check it out at: http://bookendslitagency.blogspot.com/  And congratulations all of you!  I know you've been working hard.  Doesn't justification feel fine?

Holiday Amusement

Pat present:

No one warned me that the Easter Bunny came with horns and fangs.

Ahem. Forgive me, I’m still practicing opening hooks and high concept.  Vampire bunnies probably aren’t my style though.

I’m writing this on St Patrick’s Day because I’ll be leaving to visit family for Easter later this week.  Did you know that the last time St Pat's Day and Easter fell in the same week was in 1940, when they were on the same day, and won't happen again until 2160?  Really, the church ought to make some dispensation for postponing early Easters!  Here in Missouri, it’s not even thinking about spring yet.  Surely it’s a sin to wear winter black on Easter? Unless you’re a vampire bunny, I guess.

Since I had to fit writing this column in between finishing proposals due after I return from this week’s family outing, next week’s conference, and planning a blog ad campaign for the summer book, I thought I’d just Google 18th century Church of England to see what turned up about Easter. Ugly, very ugly.  I don’t recommend the result for easy reading—vampire bunnies don’t even come close when confronted with true human suffering.  The 18th century church was a political instrument, not necessarily a source of     comfort for the soul much less the poor.  The division between rich and poor in 18th century England was cataclysmic, and the church helped it to stay that way since it was essentially run by the same families as ran the government.  As much as I’d like to take on a political diatribe, this probably isn’t the place.  Although, if I turned politicians into the evil demons…  Okay, stepping back now, hands up. 

So then I Googled Easter to see why rabbits bring eggs for Easter, which was a much more amusing venture.  It seems rabbits make hollow nests in spring, and a type of bird often uses those hollows for its eggs, so some poor misled creature decided rabbits laid eggs.  Or so the story goes.  (Did you know that rabbits can be pregnant with one litter and then become pregnant with a second litter before the first is born?  The phrase “breeds like bunnies” is at least accurate!)  The reason for coloring eggs at Easter is much less clear but goes back to Greek times. Most cultures use eggs as a symbol of rebirth, which connects them with spring. And the Catholic religion forbade eating eggs during Lent, so giving Easter eggs became a tradition in later periods.  They even had gold leaf added to the paint in medieval times.  (has anyone included that nifty bit of information in a medieval romance that anyone remembers?)

All right, just for holiday fun—can anyone name any historical romances that mention Easter or Saint Patrick’s Day?  Since I have no intention of checking every entry to see if they’re right, I’ll have Sherrie  pull the name of a commenter from today’s replies, and post the winner as Wench Queen (or King) of the Day tomorrow, where the winner will be showered with many virtual gifts and prizes.  All our subjects—er, readers—can join in the royal fun by sending me links to their favorite gifts so I can post a grand display of prizes fitting for a queen or king on Thursday. Just a bit of spring madness to brighten the last gloomy days of winter!

A Grand and Green Query

Happy St. Patrick's Day! 

This is the day, as we in New York say, when everyone is Irish.
Wonderful!  What grand company to be in.

Think of all the great Irish poets and novelists:

James Joyce, Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Moore, William Butler Yeats (my man!) Lawrence Sterne, Edna O'Brien, and so many others, including the inventor of the Gothik Romance beloved of Regency females, herself: Maria Edgeworth.

Do I hear music?  Irish Music?  Of course.

Tenors!
Rockers par excellence.
Bagpipers.
And dancers, from Riverdance to step dancers everywhere.
Fantastic beers and ales, and whiskeys.
Men in Kilts. (Every man on earth would look better in a kilt, imho.)
And I'm not even Irish... except here in New York today.

Ireland's history is full and tragic and beautiful
They have castles, and had (and have) aristocrats.

So riddle me this: Why are there not more Historical Romances set in Ireland?

Nora Roberts writes loverly romances with Irish backgrounds, but they are contemporary.
The only two historicals I know are: Sara Healy's THE GREEN MAN.
(I read it long ago, but not since. Still I remember it fondly.)
And R. A. Macavoy's whiz bang "THE WHITE HORSE" is a wonderfully heartwarming love story with paranormal elements too.  It's a book that endures, I often re-read it.

Movies, we got:
THE QUIET MAN is one of the best screen romances ever.

There are others, too numerous to list.

Actors? Be still my fantasies. Le pant pant: Peter O'Toole, Aidan Quinn, Liam Neeson, Colin Farrell, Pierce Brosnan, Jonathan Rhys Meyeres,, Cillian Murphy and many many others.
(We shall skip actors of the female persuasion, because although they are as numerous and gorgeous, I do not daydream or nightdream about them.)

But Historical Novels about Ireland? A paucity.
Scarlet O'Hara was Irish, and she lived at Tara, but GONE WITH THE WIND was set in America.

There are tons of Scottish Historicals.  I love them too.
And many fine "straight" Historicals novels set in Ireland.

Why not more Historical Romances?

I haven't written any romances set there either, true.  But remember I'm only Irish on St. Patricks' day, and also, the lilting idiom of the language eludes my writing ear.

I wrote a book with some Welsh characters, partially set in Wales.  I've been there - up and down and across that lovely land, and found the idiom easier to reflect in English.  (Think Yoda: backwards she writes.) That book had a wonderful love story.  But there were also beheadings and various awful executions galore. 

It was a "straight" Historical called QUEEN OF SHADOWS: A Novel of Isabella, Wife of Edward ll by Edith Felber.  (And by the way - this very week, the Czechs bought QUEEN OF SHADOWS for translation!)

And by the by, why not more Historical Romances set in Wales? 
But that's for another day.

On this St. Patrick's Day I must ask:no Historical Irish Romances?  Why is no one writing them?

Or have I missed them?  I know I must have done. I hate to be red-faced on this green day, so tell me if I forgot a good 'un. And can you recommend some?  Or else, explain their paucity?

HELP!  And even if you can't -- a Grand St. Pat's Day to you!

Audiobook Narrator Wanda McCaddon!

Susan Sarah here, welcoming our special guest at Word Wenches today: audiobook narrator Wanda McCaddon, who has recently recorded the audiobook of LADY MACBETH. The set (9 CDs, 13 glorious hours! *g*) is available to order directly from the audio publisher, Tantor Unabridged Audiobooks (www.tantor.com) and can also be ordered here: Lady Macbeth at Amazon.com (*please note Amazon's error in attribution – the CDs are narrated by Wanda McCaddon, not Josephine Bailey).

Originally from Staffordshire, England, Wanda now resides on the west coast. Her various careers include reporter, professor, stage and screen actress and audiobook narrator, and she has earned 16 Earphone Awards and has often been named one of AudioFile’s Golden Voices. Wanda has narrated over 600 audiobooks under her own and other names, including Donada Peters and Nadia May. Some of her releases include Karleen Koen’s Dark Angels and Through A Glass Darkly; Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice; Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre; and countless other classics as well as nonfiction and recent novels. Her latest audio release from Tantor is my own Lady Macbeth.

Listen to an audio clip from Lady Macbeth here. 

I was thrilled to learn that Lady Macbeth would be released on CD--and a bit nervous about all the Gaelic and unfamiliar terms the narrator would have to pronounce. I contacted Tantor and offered to help, and they put Wanda in touch with me. I was impressed by her gorgeous voice -- as well as her careful attention to detail and sensitivity toward the needs of the story and characters.

I’m listening to the audiobook now, and it’s superb. Wanda’s rendition of Lady Macbeth is vibrant, subtle, and powerful. She adds a rich dimension to the story in ways that a writer, dealing with words on a page, can only imagine. I’m honored by her interpretation of my characters and story -- and it’s such a treat to sit back and listen!

I asked Wanda a few questions, which she graciously answered for us. Here are her responses ....

How I became a narrator:  I began out as a newspaper reporter in England, came to the USA, started on a PhD in English, taught at UC San Diego for three years, dropped out and became an actor. Doing readings for the local PBS radio station, in 1980 I met someone who turned me on to a couple in LA who were actually paying for people to record books on cassette. That was Books on Tape – basically a kitchen table operation at that time – and they were the pioneers. They paid $25 a recorded hour for men, and $15 for women!

How audiobooks get done:  In LA, New York, and a few other places, recording is done in studios, with the narrator at the mike in a booth, and an editor on the other side of the glass stopping them if they make a mistake or suggesting a change of emphasis or intonation. I would HATE that! I’m afraid I would be arguing with them all the time.
I am a holdover from the pioneer days. I work in a sound-proofed studio in my home – a monument to all the developments in recording over the last 28 years – cluttered with microphones, cassette recorders, DAT machines, ADATs, computers, M-boxes, hard drives and gizmos. My recordings go on CD or DVD to the publisher to be proof listened, and they send me a list of clicks, pops, extraneous noises and (heaven forfend) mistakes, to be redone.

How I set about narrating a book: Most narrators “prep” a book – pre-read it to familiarize themselves with plot and characters, check tricky pronunciations etc. I don’t  if I can help it (Lady M was an exception on account of all the Gaelic!), because a) I’m very good at tricky pronunciations off the cuff and most foreign languages, and b) I want to retain the spontaneity and excitement that is part of reading a book for the first time. I want that to come through in my narration (actually, even with Lady M I just “skim-read” it – just looking for names and Gaelic – and then consulted Susan by phone).

Voices and interpretation:  Some narrators (and some publishers) prefer a straight read without voicing the characters (in the trade, “unvoiced reading”). I’m in the other camp.  To begin with, in an audiobook something has to take the place of visual cues the reader would see on the page-- paragraph breaks, quotation marks etc.-- to alert them to who is speaking. And luckily, I can’t help it – when I read a work of fiction I hear different voices. 

The narrator’s job is to interpret to the ear all the author has packed into the words – what I call “teasing out the nuances.” It’s collaborative, and largely non-intellectual, and when the writer and narrator are in synch it can be astonishing. With Lady M it didn’t hurt that I am half Scots, know the land and the people and the history well and can do a passable Scottish accent! 

But that was only half the equation; the scenes were so vivid, I was so aware of sounds and smells and shadows and voices, of the fierceness of heart beat. Lady M just battered her way into me in the first scene, and that was it!  It was an exhilarating ride, and not always an easy one. I’m highly emotional, and many times I found myself in tears  -- a real pain in the butt for a narrator, as it means breaking off until the hoarseness clears and the nose stops running!

What kinds of books do I most enjoy? Fiction (well written!) is most fun, and most challenging because of the characters. History next, because I’m learning new and (hopefully) interesting things – although I rarely remember them beyond the next recording session. Biography last, and only if I like the subject.

Currently I’m lucky enough to be re-recording classics – Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Thackeray – what bliss!

Many, many thanks, Wanda, for visiting Word Wenches! This is fascinating stuff, and it's great to learn more about the audiobook world from such a gifted and knowledgeable insider. What a great job you have -- reading for a living would be divine.

Please help us welcome Wanda here at Word Wenches (wwwowww!). If you have more questions about audiobooks, feel free to ask! She'll be checking in to say hello.

~Susan Sarah

Learning new tricks

From Loretta:

About a year ago, I blogged about the things one wants to do but never gets around to.  One of those things was reading The Expedition of Humphry Clinker.  As mentioned in a later blog, I did finally read it, with great delight. 

Another thing I never got around to was learning Italian.  I am not sure what finally did it.  Watching Divorce, Italian Style?  Writing Your Scandalous Ways and immersing myself in Venice (even though Venetian & Italian are not the same language)?

Whatever the impetus, ten days ago my husband and I started Conversational Italian classes.  Thanks to our amazingly patient teacher--an actual Italian man who is actually from Italy--I can now greet people (Buon giorno, everybody!) and introduce myself (Mi chiamo Loretta) as well as identify the dog, the cat, the pen, the mother, the father, the blackboard, the professor, the dictionary, and some other things.

(That's il cane to the left.)

Anyway, my vocabulary is growing by something less than leaps and bounds but it’s all interesting and enjoyable as well as incredibly hard, because I am two or three hundred years old, not five or six, which is the age at which one really ought to begin learning other languages.  We have one high school student in our class, and...OK, I want to shake her because it’s so much easier for her to learn.  It’s a good thing we haven’t any first graders in the class, to humiliate the lot of us.

However, the class also includes a veteran of WWII.  If he can learn, so can I.
He, however, agrees that the older you get, the harder it is to learn a new language.  And Italian ain’t easy to begin with.

As happens with so many other languages, we English speakers must wrestle with masculine and feminine nouns and the assorted articles one must attach to same.  English has one definite article, “the.”  It has two indefinite articles, “a” and “an.”  This is one way we make up for the completely demented way we spell and pronounce words.  Italian, which has a consistent way of spelling and pronouncing, has seven thousand articles.  Or so it seems to a beginner.

And we haven’t even got to conjugating verbs yet.

However, my husband and I both did learn Latin back a century or two ago, and while we have forgotten most of what we learned, we do recognize similarities and grasp certain foreign concepts.  Like the difference between the formal and informal or singular and plural second person.  In English, we lost this distinction a good while back.  In English, you are always “you” whether you are the president of the company or my sister, no matter how many of you there are.  Not so in other languages.  This, I ought to point out, includes the language Southern (my husband’s native tongue), in which the plural of you is formed thusly:  “you all.”  And contracted to “y’all.”

But I digress.
Why learn a new language at this time of my life?  It’s not as though I lack for ways to occupy my time.  In fact, my time is horrendously  over-occupied.
But as I told the teacher when he asked us why we were taking the class, learning Italian was simply something I’ve always wanted to do.  I did not tell him that I am an author, so he doesn't know that my latest book is set in Venice, or that discussions with my brilliant and hard-working consultant, Anna of the Isn’t it Romantic blog, gave me a new appreciation of the language and its subtleties.  Yet it’s likely that writing and researching Your Scandalous Ways as well as those discussions gave me the final push to do something that, frankly, is a little scary.

I have been writing for... erm...a really long time.  I’ve grown comfortable with the English language and developed a degree of skill in using it.  There’s a sense of accomplishment in having attained a degree of proficiency (though by no means perfection) in the language of my early 19thC English characters.  It’s gratifying to know something about a particular historical period in a particular place, to be able to recognize names and dates and have a picture in my head of a world that’s invisible to most other people.  It's easy to build on this foundation.  It's easy to visualize and place people and events every time I open a new book on some aspect of this subject.  With early 19th C England, with the English language, in short, I’m in my comfort zone.

Starting all over again, plunging into a new world and language with a much older brain, is humbling, to say the least.  And at the same time, it’s exhilarating.  Every word and concept I master feels like a great accomplishment.  That is not a feeling one has every day in one’s everyday life.  In fact, it's the closest I've come to the thrill I felt when I first learned to read.

What about you?  Is there something you’ve always wanted to learn--if you could afford it or find the time or work up the courage?  Have you done it?  Do you think you will?  And if any of you have studied Italian--or any other language, for that matter--please feel free to share the experience.

Gifts of the Muse

Jo here. I'm going to talk about the writing process for a change. (Charlie lurking amid tiny grapes that will one day swell and make wine is vaguely appropriate.)

The creative process is not something I blog about a lot because I don't often analyze it, and most of the time it fits with the catch phrase in Shakespeare In Love -- "It's a mystery."

The other day I was trying to think back to the days before I seriously tried to write a book to recall how I thought authors created one. I'm not sure I ever thought about it at all, but I probably assumed the writers were in control and knew exactly what they were doing. Perhaps I assumed it was like knitting a cardigan -- something I have never done, note! (This picture of a cardigan in the tumbling blocks quilting motif almost makes me want to try. Almost. If you're braver, the pattern is here. )

Perhaps I thought a novelist would follow the pattern, put in enough hours, and a book would come into existence. Whether it's a good book/cardigan or a terrible one would depend on both materials and skill.

As I've never met an author in calm control of the creative process, I'm sure I would have been wrong.

But I toss out my first question. If you're a reader-only -- ie you've never tried to write a book -- what thoughts do you have about how novels come to be? If you've learned a lot recently from blogs such as this, can you remember what you thought before?

The second question is, does it matter to the reader how the author creates a book? If you knew an author neatly outlined her novel and then wrote for a disciplined number of hours a day, would you expect a better book, or wouldn't it matter? What about an author who plunges into the mist every day, hoping to find the next bit of her story? Or the one who works in mad bursts then lurches around in writer's block, trying to find something to add. There are writers who are extremely fast, and sometimes people will say that they can't produce a good book. But is being very slow at a job a sign of talent?

Just some things to chew on.

I'm a fly-into-the-mist writer, and though I sometimes have vague ideas of what is to come, or at least a couple of elements I dearly hope will be part of the novel, when I start a new one nothing is certain. Nothing at all. It would be much less stressful otherwise, but we writers don't seem to have a lot of choice.

I do however, get gifts, as I'm sure all writers do, and I choose to think of them as gifts from my muse. Occasionally they are strong story ideas, or large chunks of books, but sometimes they are vignettes. They're not to be sniffed at, however, and two have formed the starting point for my current works.

The first was a scene in a coaching inn where a gentleman overhears a lady swearing. A lady, note. He is suitable shocked, but also intrigued. As she seems upset, he approaches her, intending to help. He was a sober sort of gentleman, about to be caught up in trouble. This was a regency setting and the lady was probably a governess.

I'm not sure I've ever done a meeting-at-an-inn story, so it interested me and I spent a lot of time trying to come up with a good storyline that might grow from this. I fly into the mist, but I'll take a map if I can and it felt as if I maybe could.

That, of course, was folly. I never can. When I ended up with a convoluted story about an heiress escaping guardians who were spending all her money on charitable acts, and I was trying to plot a route to somewhere useful that would take them through wilderness in Regency England, I knew I, not they, was up a swampy creek to nowhere.

But all that wild invention was probably necessary to prime the pump for the real story, which was suddenly there -- the beginning at least. A Georgian rake encountering a swearing nun in Northern France, and them setting off together into a wild adventure of murder and mayhem, must of which I had no clue about until it happened.

That's A Lady's Secret, out in a few weeks. If you like excerpts, I've just put up a second one here.

If you missed the first excerpt, you should read that first. It's here.

But the muse was generous over the past couple of years, and somewhere along the line she tossed me a scene. Not an idea of a scene like the coaching one, which I could play with in my mind, but a "write me now!" scene, complete with talons and teeth.

Hastily, I did so, wondering what I was supposed to do with it. A young officer -- very young, a teenager, still full of ideals -- dashes to an inn to prevent a fellow officer from seducing an innocent young lady. He doesn't know the girl, only that she shouldn't be ruined by a scoundrel.

At the inn the hot-headed seducer draws his sword and in the chaotic fight our young idealist kills the rotter. Enter inn servants crying murder, and shortly afterward the girl's relative, who insists that as our hero has killed the man who should have done right by her niece, he must marry her. When it seems to be that or the noose, he agrees, then rides off to war, swearing off noble gestures for life.

As I said, I wrote the scene, parked it on my disk, and thought that maybe, sometime, I'd think what to do with it. It didn't quite feel like my sort of story (which may seem nonsensical, but there you are) and it also didn't fit with the "worlds" I am writing in -- the Rogues World and the Malloren World.

But in writing A Lady's Secret I saw where my story vignette could indeed fit into the new mini-world I was creating there. I didn't plan it; it wasn't on my mind; it was simply a moment of saying, "Oh." Then, "So that's what you were doing, muse." But I still had no idea of some delightful ramifications that are being revealed as I write.

And now I'm waiting and hoping for another scene -- any type will do -- that will grow into the third story, because the first two have proved to be a great deal of fun.

So that's about what you get when I talk about the creative process. For those of you here who are writers, is this any use at all? For you readers, is this interesting or just confusing? And don't forget the questions above.

What should the reader/author interface be like? Does it matter?

And if this seems a bit rambling I'm just recovering from bronchitis and a cold and I don't think my brain's had adequate oxygen for at least a week! Oh, yes, I should mention that Lovers and Ladies will be out in April, too. I keep forgetting it. Isn't that awful? Especially when it contains two of my early inspirations. There are excerpts of those stories up, too. Check out more here.

Cheers,

Jo

Rags to Riches

by Susan/Miranda

Last month, Wench Loretta’s blog Too Young to Marry? began a fascinating discussion about the ages of our historical heroines, and whether the young women of the past were more mature at an earlier age and better prepared to assume adult responsibilities than their contemporaries today.

There were many different examples given of young women, both from history and from fiction, a most capable bunch.  But the more I thought about this question, the more I realized how all the young women we mentioned, whether from the American west or a Jane Austen novel, all had a certain level of family support and education to help them on their way.  Jane Eyre was an orphan, but educated well enough to become a governess.  The women in Sense and Sensibility are said to have been left paupers when Mr. Dashwood died, yet there is poor, and there is poor, and the Dashwoods’ degree of poverty still allowed for a handsome “cottage” and a servant or two.

In male-oriented fiction, real rags-to-riches stories abound.  The orphan from the workhouse becomes the industrious apprentice who marries the master’s daughter and eventually owns the business.  The barefoot cabin-boy toils at his navigation and works his way up through the ranks to become an admiral.  The immigrant son learns English, puts himself through law school while working two jobs to support his widowed mother, becomes a crusading district attorney, and finally governor. 

But where are the girls?  Before the twentieth century made education more universal for women, there were many more girls starting life in sweatshop factories, dairies, and as servants than those sharing the comfortable “plight” of the Dashwood sisters.  Granted, the sexism and prejudice of the past would have made it quite challenging for a poor girl to work her way upwards to prosperity, yet it did occasionally happen.  Industrious, low-born women did become master silversmiths, cooks in great houses, and owners of prosperous inns and shops, though never to the same giddy heights of success that men could.  Of course the surest way for a woman to rise was on the coattails of a man, as a wife or a mistress, but even then in reality there were very few peers willing to play Henry Higgins for the sake of an aspiring Eliza Doolittles from the street.

So why aren’t there more in fiction beyond Becky Sharpe in Vanity Fair and The Unsinkable Molly Brown?  We writers are supposed to be in the business of dreams and escape and giddy “what if.”  Why don’t more girls get the Horatio Alger treatment?  In much contemporary women’s fiction, the message is even worse.  The heroines do get the chance to work hard to achieve success –– power, glamour, careers, wealth –– but their success seems only to make them miserable in a way that never affects heroes.  The only way these heroines can be truly happy is to return to their humble roots in the decaying small town/low-paying job/high school crush that they’d worked so hard to escape in the first place.  They’re almost like cautionary tales against dreaming too high.  Heck, look what happened to enterprising Mildred Pierce and her pie-shops!

But, as usual, I digress. 

I have to admit that I’d never written a true rags-to-riches heroine myself.  Oh, I’ve done a couple that came close, a fisherman’s daughter and a seamstress, but never anyone who starts out with every card stacked against her.  Which is one of the reasons I was so captivated by Nell Gwyn, the 17th century woman whose life forms the story of my next historical novel, The King’s Favorite, due out this summer.

Born in Oxford in 1650, Nell was the illegitimate daughter of a soldier and camp-follower.  When her father was killed in the English Civil War, her mother moved to London with Nell and her older sister, where they lived above the brothel where the mother worked.  By any standard, it was an appalling childhood.  Malnourished, illiterate, and beaten by her alcoholic mother, young Nell worked as a barefoot herring vendor in the street by day and served ale at the brothel by night. 

But Nell was ambitious, and refused to follow the grim path taken by her mother and sister.  She was determined to do better for herself in the raucous world of 17th century London.  She was clever, funny, and charming, a talented singer and dancer, and blessed (or cursed) with an almost insatiable need for an audience to entertain.  By fifteen, she was selling oranges in the new Theatre Royal and bantering  merrily with lords and peers.  A year later, she was one of the first actresses on the English stage.  Before her twentieth birthday, she’d made herself a headlining star, with plays written specifically to showcase her talents and crowds of fans cheering her wherever she went. 

In a promiscuous era, Nell had only four lovers during her short life.  The most famous, of course, was King Charles II, but she insisted on establishing a friendship between them long before she shared his bed –– likely the reason she was his lover for nearly fifteen years, until his death.  Yet no matter how high Nell rose, she never forgot where she’d started, and remained as great a favorite with the common folk in the street as she was at the palace.  Even today Nell Gwyn is something of a folk-hero in England, a splendid testimony to her “rags to riches” life, and a wonderful inspiration for me as I told her story.

Is your memory for books better than mine?  Can you name more true “rags to riches” heroines than I could?  Do you admire such women, or would you rather your heroine came equipped with her silver spoon rather than have to earn it?

Quiet Fiction

Pat here, rummaging around in Ye Olde Question Box.  I’m still playing with contemporary ideas, researching asthma and Jaguars and other modern terms, so I’m  not in a place to play with historical research blogs.  And unless you want to hear a diatribe about never-ending winter, I thought I’d answer reader questions instead. Given that I’m currently trying new directions, the  question below seemed appropriate.  Nina, I owe you one book!

Nina Paules writes:  What would the WW’s write if they could write anything they wanted to write?  In other words… if there was no consumer dictating style and plot direction via their purchasing habits, how might things be different?

This is a topic near and dear to my heart, and one discussed endlessly in authorial circles. Or authorial squares or mob scenes, depending on setting. 

First off—I am not talking about “writing what’s hot.”  That’s a fool’s journey.  I could write the next greatest vampire story in history and not sell it tomorrow because NYC will have decided the “vampire market is saturated.”  I could invent a whole new brilliant genre untapped by anyone and NYC will decide “it’s too different, we don’t know where to market it.”  So forget the flavor of the month. I’m not going there.

What’s bugging me right now is “high concept,” a film related term that's been  picked up by publishers.

Yeah, I’m also bugged because so many readers insist on Regency historicals and very few want western historicals and all that jazz, but I’ve found my way around most of those deficiencies.  If I want to write a book, I find a way to do it. I’m creative. I might dabble in first person POV for an idea I'm playing with, but since that idea doesn’t fit any subgenre known to mankind, I’m not foolish enough to market it. I'm writing it for myself.  I suppose, if we discarded all market guidelines, that's what would happen--a lot of insane writers would run screaming into the streets, joyously trying everything they've ever wanted to do.  Murder and mayhem would undoubtedly result. And readers would run screaming for the sanity of their televisions.

But I'm not totally blase about market restrictions. Right now, the craze du jour that can’t be escaped is “high concept” books, especially in the contemporary market.  I cannot begin to understand how one writes a high concept historical unless it’s something of the order of “Prince of Wales kidnaps Arab Sheik’s Daughter.”  Essentially, everything in history has already been done, so we’ve got to stretch ourselves pretty danged far to make a historical romance into high concept.

I suppose if one considers Eloisa James’ historical Duke and Duchess series high concept, then maybe it can be done, and I can handle it some of the time.

That’s just it.  I can respect and read and enjoy many high concept books.  “Daily Reporter Takes Down Superhero”—KARMA GIRL by Jennifer Estep; “Psychic Weather Forecaster Gets TV Show”—FORECAST by Jane Tara. Go ahead, name some more.  Seems like every contemporary out now stretches for an even wilder and more improbable premise.  And I’m okay with that—up to a point.

But what I really, really want to see and write right now is what some of us have been calling “quiet fiction.”  We want REAL people.  We want real life situations. We’re tired of Soccer Mom Kills Demons (no offense—I like Julie’s books, but her concept was original when she first wrote it. Let’s not keep asking the rest of us to repeat it).  Why can’t we write about women who worry about their weight and women who lose their jobs and women who get the job they’ve always wanted and hate it?  Why shouldn’t we write about women who save trees or cities by doing something normal like writing petitions and protesting or even running for office?  Normal people. Normal situations. Not out-there-on-a-limb-so-far-its-gonna-break high concepts.  If anyone has any recommendations along the “quiet fiction” line, let me know! I know about the long-time bestsellers such as Siddons and Binchy. I want to hear about new authors making waves in this market.  Anyone?

Fortunately or unfortunately, the only quiet fiction I’m finding right now is in inspirational, and I fear most of those go a little too far in the opposite direction.  Not all.  Beth Patillo is a name that comes to mind as a great writer of “quiet fiction” about normal people, some of whom just happen to be ministers. 

But as of this moment, most romance editors seem to be after Navy Seals, Werewolves meet Frankenstein, Billionaire Buys Waitress (or better yet, Waitress Rejects Billionaire, but then it wouldn’t be romance <G>), complete with over-the-top sex and violence. 

Whatever happened to Neighbor Falls in Love with Neighbor?  Sure, it sounds boring, but given the right conflict and a good writer, any topic can reduce a reader to tears and laughter.  The problem is that publishers have to SELL quiet books, and it’s not easy without a great hook shouting pickup lines to readers.  Currently, to sell books, we have to pimp the cover with smoke and mirrors and hunks, and whisper come hither promises in the back copy, before a book even lands on a bookstore shelf.  Once it’s on the shelf, it has to make another big leap into the customer’s hands.  What are the chances of MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON leaping into anyone’s hands when DANGEROUS DECEPTIONS is sitting next to it?  (and my apologies to anyone with that title—I count six recent ones on Amazon—I mean no offense. It’s a great title, which makes my point.)  We can’t even sell quiet titles anymore.

So I’m throwing this rant over to our readers---prove me wrong. Name some great quiet fiction you’ve read recently.  Give me quiet titles and artwork that work for some good books.

Or tell me why you’d rather read monsters and serial killers and superheroes and royalty than about the boy next door. I really want to know.

And the Wiener is . . .

Lori has won an ARC (advanced reading copy) of Susan Fraser King's Lady Macbeth!  Congratulations, Lori!  Please send your mailing address to Susan/Sarah or Sherrie and your autographed ARC will soon be on its way!

There and back again

by Mary Jo

Spending the first week of February in the Caribbean in the honorable pursuit of Vitamin D to tide us through the winter got me to thinking about vacations in general and the history of vacations in particular. 

We had a lovely trip to Virgin Gorda--highs in the mid 80s, lows in the upper 70s, and the turquoise Caribbean rolling in about 20 feet away from our broad, covered patio--what's not to like?  <g>  And having a crowing rooster in the back of the very small plane that took us between San Juan, Puerto Rico and Virgin Gorda just added to the exotic fun. 

From a historical perspective, it’s pretty amazing that we can climb on an airplane, fly a few hours, and vacation in a different climate and time zone.  A journey across the Atlantic which once took months can be done overnight—for a long weekend getaway, if one wishes. 

I think that the desire to see other places is innate, though some people feel it much more strongly than others. (Wave an airline ticket and my sister will follow anyone anywhere.) 

People with a lot of money have always been able to travel, and one of the first great travel destinations was Egypt, with its incredible tombs, temples, and pyramids.  Rich Greeks and Romans visited—and left their graffiti. 

Side note:  Graffiti are an inevitable consequence of travel.  Napoleon’s soldiers left their share of marks on Egyptian monuments, and Byron famously carved his name on the ruins of the Temple of Poseidon in Sounion, Greece: http://ssad.bowdoin.edu:9780/snipsnap/eng242-s05/space/Temple+of+Poseidon

So rich people have always traveled, but from the wonderful Marcus Didius Falco mysteries by Lindsey Davis, I learned that middle-class Romans were travelers, too.  In fact, they seeme to have invented the package tour.  In the Roman empires, several critical factors allowed tourism to take root: Roman roads and the Pax Romana made travel relatively safe, and there were people with enough money and leisure to take advantage of that.   

The Lindsey Davis book that tipped me off was See Delphi and Die, in which Falco, a tough, smart mouthed Roman informer that Sam Spade would recognize, goes off to Greece to investigate the murders of two Roman girls in Olympus.  I strongly recommend the Falco novels—they’re smart and funny and reflect great research, and they take place all over the Roman empire.  While I don’t advocate using another writer’s fiction as serious research, one can learn a lot about Rome and Roman society from reading Lindsey Davis.  http://www.lindseydavis.co.uk/   

Her discussion of Roman package tours got me to a’googling, and I found the delightful site of Tony Perrottet, whose book Route 66 A. D. chronicles his adventures in following the ancient Roman tourist routes with a backpack and his pregnant girlfriend.  This link is to his home page, which describes the background of his book:  http://www.tonyperrottet.com/paganholiday/index.php   while this one is an excerpt from the book describing how Naples was the summer playground of rich Romans. http://www.tonyperrottet.com/paganholiday/excerpt.php  (I think I'm going to have to buy the book.) 

So this sort of thing had been going on for a long time. 

When the Roman Empire collapsed, travel was no longer safe.  People still traveled, of course, but they tended to have compelling reasons and armed guards.  For an average man, the main ways to travel were to become a soldier (always a dicey proposition in terms of returning home), or to take a pilgrimage.

Pilgrimages flourished through out the middle ages, and continue today.  They can take place for many reasons: religious devotion, the desire to pray for a child or a healing, to give thanks, to confess and seek redemption. 

But having a good time and seeing a new place and meeting new people were surely part of the motive for many pilgrims  The Canterbury Tales make it clear that it’s April and a jolly good time to ride out on a pilgrimage:

When in April the sweet showers fall
That pierce March's drought to the root and all
And bathed every vein in liquor that has power
To generate therein and sire the flower
………..
Then folk do long to go on pilgrimage.

Margery Kempe was one of the most famous pilgrims, a middle class married woman and mother with a strong spiritual calling who made many pilgrimages, going as far afield as Rome, Jerusalem, and Spain.  The Book of Margery Kempe tells of her spiritual ponderings and her journeys, and is sometimes considered the first autobiography in vernacular English.  (It was apparently ghost written, but that's a mere detail.)

In the 18th century, the Grand Tour became popular for the sort of rich gentlemen we write about.  They would visit the great capitals of Europe with tutors and servants and perhaps an artist who would draw the sites visited.  (Holiday pictures were labor intensive in the days before cameras. <g>) 

The great age of travel for the average person—people like us, in other words—came in the 19th century, with the invention of better roads, trains and steamships.  The roads came first—in Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth’s aunt and uncle take her on a tour and that’s how she sees Darcy’s home, Pemberley. 

But it was the trains that really opened the floodgates.  Thomas Cook was a devout Baptist and temperance advocate who in 1841 got the idea of cutting a deal with a British railroad to transport a group of other temperance workers to a rally, taking them eleven miles for a shilling a head, which included transport and food.  Not a bad deal. 

His idea was successful, and soon he was organizing other tours within England, and then abroad, to the point where the phrase “a Cook’s tour” came into the language. 

Within England, trains made it possible for the working class to take holidays, and like lemmings, they headed to the sea both for day trips and longer holidays.  Seaside towns like Blackpool and Weston-super-Mare flourished.  And if the water was cold and the beach made of shingle rather than sand—there were piers and amusements and new people to meet.  It was a holiday and exciting--a journey the whole family could look forward to all year.

From there, it's been a steady progression to backpackers and Labor Day weekend traffic jams.  I made the student grand tour of Europe myself after my sophomore year in college, traveling with a friend by bike and thumb and train over a good part of Europe.  I'll never forget the excitement of landing at Heathrow for the first time and knowing that finally, finally I was in England.  (I was apparently born an Anglophile. <g>)

So I like to think that we were following an old and honorable tradition by going to Virgin Gorda, where we could admire the other dramatic volcanic islands around the Sir Francis Drake Channel, and we contemplate cruising and diving pelicans.  Of which there were many. (What is the collective noun--a passel of pelicans???) 

A few years ago a friend of long standing called me because her high school senior daughter wanted to spend spring break in London with her boyfriend.  My friend, a happy homebody, was not at all keen on the idea, and it’s to her credit that she called me for input, because she had to have known someone who has traveled as much as I have would say “Let them go!”  Not only were both kids responsible young adults—as I pointed out, London was surely safer than Ft. Lauderdale during spring break.  So her daughter and boyfriend went to London and had a wonderful time, and returned with a broader view of the world.

And that's why we take holidays, isn't it?  To enjoy and learn and get a broader fiew of the world.  So what great trips have you taken?  And what journeys would you like to make?  What’s on your personal list of “places to see before I die?”  I’d love to hear!

Mary Jo, who loves to travel—and loves to come home again.  (Author in the tropics on the left.  And if you wonder why there is no detail--see my blog on introverts. <G>)