Word Wenches

WWR - What we've read in February

Anne here, reporting on what some of the wenches have been reading during the month of February. I say "some of the wenches" because several of us are storming towards an imminent deadline. And this month we have a lovely mixed bag for you — non-fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, alternate reality, historical and contemporaries.

We start with Andrea/Cara.
This month my reading has been about heroines, though in very different contexts . . . First off, was Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly, the inspiring story of the Black women mathematicians who played such a critical—yet unsung—part in not only the U.S. Mercury and Apollo Space programs, but also in the aeronautic innovations that helped win WWII. It’s a truly amazing panorama, with heartwarming (and heartbreaking) stories of the individual women who faced the dual prejudices of race and gender but ultimately triumphed in pursuing their dreams of fulfilling their remarkable talents through courage, grace, grit and the sheer force of their brilliance.

But it’s not simply a story of brilliant women. The author paints an eye-opening portrait of segregation in the South, and how the black communities banded together to create a whole network of opportunities in business and education which allowed them to excel and achieve despite all the obstacles in their way. It’s one of the most moving books I’ve read in a long time. It ought to be required reading in schools, for it tells a story in American history that’s been hidden for far too long. (The movie is wonderful, too—I highly recommend it!)

Moonshadows: An Interview with Melinda Hammond

Nicola here. Today it is my very great pleasure to welcome Melinda Hammond back to the Word Wench blog. Melinda Hammond/Sarah Mallory is a long time Romantic Novelists’ Association friend and colleague of mine and we share the same taste in fast cars! She is also an award-winning author of Regency historicals. Today, however, we are chatting about her haunting timeslip novel Moonshadows, set in the Georgian period and the present day, originally published by Samhain and now re-issued by Melinda herself.

I first read Moonshadows a number of years ago and found it a thought-provoking read as well as a beautiful mix of the past and the present. In the interview below, Melinda mentions why she feels the story takes a different slant on the idea of the 18^th century rake. The conflict at the heart of the story is strong and heartbreaking and (no spoilers!) tells of the ultimate price of getting what you wish for…

The List of Ten Desired Things

copyedits with my cat lying on them

Joanna here.

I was going to write a long post on The Life of Regency Dogs, which is an interesting topic and I will get to it some other time, but I’m feeling strung out and stunned and exhilarated all at the same time and thought I’d indulge myself in doing a more personal post.

I’ve just finished the copyedits of Beauty Like the Night, which will be out August 1 and is available for pre-order. I sent in the copyedits on Tuesday morning very, very early. Oh Dark Hundred as we call it.

What this means in the Great Journey of Publishing is that I have let BLTN go. I’ve pried my fingers off the story. I will try not to think about how it fails and succeeds and what readers are going to say about it. I have, metaphorically, handed BLTN its lunchbox and waved goodbye and I watch it catch the schoolbus.

I am a woman, if not at leisure, at least a woman between projects.

What does such a woman do when she can pick and choose among all the duties and delights of life. All the practical necessary stuff I’ve put off must now be done. Those many nonproductive things that give me joy are now possible.

So. What were the first ten things this free and unconstrained woman chose to do?

Islands in the Stream

  by Mary Jo

The Mayhem Consultant and I like to take winter vacations to warmer, sunnier places, and that generally means the Caribbean, which can be reached from Maryland with a mere four hour flight.  The warmth and sunshine are reliable, but the bonus is that the Caribbean is like a spilled jewel box of islands, each with its own unique character.  

This year's main vacation was a cruise on a Windstar ship, the Star Legend.  Because it carries only 212 passengers, the ship can visit small, out of the way islands.  Such islands don't have large modern ports, so passengers usually go ashore on tenders, which adds to the fun.

This particular cruise started and ended in Puerto Rico, which is the gateway to the Eastern Caribbean.  Cruise ships sail from San Juan and there are small planes that fly out to farflung islands.   I cherish the memory of our first visit to Virgin Gorda in the British Virgin Islands, when our 10 passenger plane included a caged rooster sitting on luggage behind the seats.  As you might imagine, he was not a happy rooster, but he made it safely to his new home. <G>

Antiqua San Juan

Over the years we've spent scattered days in San Juan while coming and going from vacations, but this time we decided to go two days early, partly to visit an old college friend who is a professor at the university and also as a buffer against possible bad weather that might interfere with leaving Baltimore. (This turned out to be unnecessary--there's been virtually no snow this winter.  But I like to be prepared for the worst because sometimes we've been hit with blizzards when we're trying to escape .)

In San Juan, we decided to stay at a hotel in the historic area, called El Convento. which is literally a 350 year old Carmelite convent built across the street from the oldest cathedral in North America.  I'm told there were tunnels to allow the nuns to go to the cathedral in privacy.  

There has been a lot of remodeling since the nuns left, and the hotel rooms are beautiful, not tiny cells.  But the really spectacular part is the courtyard, where meals are served under gorgeous trees.  Heaven to have a late lunch after flying in from the US!  

Originally founded by Ponce de Leon, Old San Juan has narrow streets and steep hills and not much parking, but it's beautiful and rich with history.  Puerto Rico ("Rich Port") itself is fascinating: as a commonwealth of the United States, there is a lot of American influence and a lot of bilingual people, but the country is very much itself, with a proud Hispanic history.  We want to return to El Convento as part of future getaways.  

Saint Bart's:

One of the first visits on our cruise was Gustavia, the capital of St. Barthélemy, a French island and known as a hangout for the glittering rich.  I didn't know much about it other than the rugged island's only airport has such a short runway that only six passenger planes can land, and when they fly in over the rugged mountains, the pilot has to cut the engine and glide onto the runway!  Strong men who have climbed mountains and dived from airplanes admit to being terrified.  Above is a picture and yes, the runway really is that short!

The glittering part was true, too.  The harbor was packed with yachts and the main street was one world class boutique after another: Hermes, Bulgari, Louis Vuitton, and other brands I'm too provincial to recognize. <G>  

But what impressed me the most was getting off the tender and seeing a Windstar crewman pushing a small trolley with a very, very large fish on it.  See that tail?  I asked what he had and was told it was a mahi mahi and yes, it would be dinner on board ship that night.  Sure enough, this placard with the chef's dinner special showed up a few hours later. <G>  

Montserrat:    

All of the islands were interesting, but the one that impressed me the most was Montserrat, about which I had known absolutely nothing.  I thought it was a French island because of the name, but in fact it is a British Overseas Territory.  (A lot of the Caribbean islands changed hands over the years in a colonial version of musical chairs.)

Montserrat was nicknamed the Emerald Island of the Caribbean both because of its lush greenery and because of the number of Irish who settled there.  Apparently Gaelic was spoken in places on the island into the 19th century, and we were told it's the only country besides Ireland where St. Patrick's Day is a legal holiday.

But what makes Montserrat so memorable is what the island has suffered.  Hurricane Hugo blasted the island in 1989, leaving 90% of the population homeless.  One of the things destroyed was the recording studio built by Sir George Martin, manager of the Beatles.  Many famous musicians, from the Rolling Stones to Paul McCartney to Jimmy Buffet had recorded albums there, enjoying a world class studio in a tropical paradise.

But worse was to come.  In 1995, a long dormant volcano in the southern section of the island erupted and continued its destruction for years.  About 60% of the island was covered with lava and ash and the 18th century island capital, Plymouth, was completely destroyed.  The majority of the population left the island and much of it is now an exclusion zone where entry is forbidden.  

We were lucky enough to hire a tour guide who was a retired police officer.  He'd been one of the first people on the island to discover the eruption, and he was in charge of the evacuation.  Relatively few islanders died--about 21, he said--but the beautiful, prospering island was devastated.  Slowly, stalwart islanders are rebuilding and there will be a new capital at Little Bay.  This is one island I will not forget.  

Jost Van Dyke:

Our last port of call ended the cruise on a much lighter note.  Jost Van Dyke is the smallest of the four main islands of the British Virgins.  It's only three square miles and very rugged, with only about 300 residents.  Several times we vacationed on Tortola, the largest island in the BVI and only about five miles away.  We saw Jost floating in the distance like Bali Hai, but getting there is complicated and we never made it over.

This time, we finally reached Jost Van Dyke.  I'd contacted a local taxi company to hire a driver and guide, and the charming woman who arranged our trip joined us on our journey, which went up and over the hills and brought us to Foxy's, a well known local beach bar, where we had lunch.  All the people we met were wonderfully friendly and it was fun all the way.  

A bonus was the sea grapes I saw at Foxy's.  Somewhere between a shrub and a tree, sea grapes love beaches and are found throughout the Caribbean, but for the first time ever, I saw them bearing fruit. And yes, they do look very much like grapes.  The green turns purple and it's said that the fruit has a lovely taste.  Maybe next time I'll find a some sea grape preserves.

For surely there will be a next time because there are still many islands we haven't seen! 

Do you have favorite islands? Not just tropical ones, but anywhere?  Because there is something about an island…..!

Mary Jo

Princess Power!

Andrea/Cara here. I recently saw a fascinating museum exhibit entitled “Enlightened Princesses: Caroline, Augusta, Charlotte and the Shaping of the Modern World.” These three German princesses—Caroline of Ansbach, Augusta of Saxe-Gotha and Charlotte of Mecklenberg-Strelitz—all married into the British royal family and each had a profound influence on their adopted country. Needless to say, I came away enlightened!

According to Amy Meyers, Director of the Yale Center for British Art and the organizing curator, “The princesses had sweeping intellectual, social, cultural, and political interests, which helped to shape the courts in which they lived, and encouraged the era’s greatest philosophers, scientists, artists, and architects to develop important ideas that would guide ensuing generations. The palaces and royal gardens they inhabited served as incubators for enlightened conversation and experimentation, and functioned as platforms to project the latest cultural developments to an international audience.”

Of the three, I was most familiar with Caroline of Ansbach. Orphaned at age eleven, she went live with Friederich III, Elector of Brandenberg, and the first King of Prussia. A highly intelligent and attractive woman, she thrived in Freiderich’s open-minded court, where she became friends with Gottfried Leibnitz, one of the leading intellectual giants of the 18th century. She then married George Augustus of Hanover, and when his father acceded to the British throne as George I on the death of Queen Anne, the young couple followed him to London as the Prince and Princess of Wales.

Caroline was very involved in politics—she and her husband were often at loggerheads with George I, and for a time they were under house arrest and forbidden to see their children, Later, she served as Regent several times during her husband’s reign George II, when he made prolonged visits to Germany. But it was as a leader in shaping the culture of her court and the country for which she has earned high accolades from historians. Lucy Wortley called her  “the cleverest queen consort ever to sit on the throne of England.”

Things That Go Thump in the NIght

Quantum has asked for our “views/discussion of paranormal fiction, particularly with ghosts and time slip involved.” She adds, “It seems to me that plausibility is very important in grabbing reader interest, but main stream science is rather dismissive of this area. . .What do the Wenches think?”

Well, as always, the Wenches have an opinion, and we owe Quantum one free book for her excellent question, thank you!

From Pat:

I’ll let the other Wenches speak to their own beliefs, but I’m totally open to all possibilities, up to and including space aliens seeding this earth a gazillion years ago. <G> Science tends to be fact-focused, as it should be, and facts are very hard to come by when it comes to the more woo-woo aspects of our world. Scientists have their hands full measuring what they can see. Working with what they can’t see is currently beyond their abilities, and possibly, beyond the imaginations of the people who fund them.

I like to believe that people who claim to see ghosts, possess clairvoyance, or other unexplained oddities have neural pathways that we have yet to explore. And maybe one day we’ll understand what’s behind string theory and quantum physics and develop a better comprehension  of what reality means.

The Hero in the Black Hat

Photo by Stephan Zabel for iStockphoto, used by permission

Susanna here, with a post that I first wrote five years ago, but which seems fitting to me for the day before Valentine's Day (and I'm really in need of a hero these days, so I can't wait to see who you recommend afterwards):

One of the first things I learned as a child watching Saturday matinee movies was that, in a western, the guys in the black hats were usually up to no good. There were few shades of grey in those films: If a man wore a black hat and rode a black horse, he was bad to the core. (Well, or Zorro, but Zorro was Spanish and from California so he had more fashion sense than other heroes...)

The point is, if somebody looked like a villain, he was. This holds true for most bad guys in fiction as well, so I secretly love it when skilled writers put a black hat on a hero and send him out into the plot to confound us.

A Valentine Book

Susan here –you may have noticed, in our February Word Wenches e-newsletter, an image at the top of the page (if you haven’t subscribed to our newsletter, you can sign up here in the right-hand column!). The image is a detail from a medieval painting of hands holding a heart-shaped book. The curious little book isn’t common, and I wanted to know more.  

Years ago, when I was a PhD student studying medieval art and majoring in Netherlandish/Northern Renaissance art, this sort of thing was right up my alley. The painting, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a 15th century unidentified portrait by a Netherlandish artist called the Master of the View of Sainte-Gudule, based on the portrait-like depiction of the church of Ste-Gudule in Brussels in the background. There are several other works attributed to him (and the artist could be a woman--they also worked as painters and illuminators), with all the works dating to 1480 to 1500. The master seems to have worked in Brussels, smack in the region so well known for the brilliantly realistic, meticulously detailed paintings of the 15th c. Netherlandish style, which developed in part from the tradition of book illumination; the style flourished with Jan Van Eyck and others including
Rogier van der Weyden and Hans Memling.

This painting, oil on wood panel, may have been part of a diptych—a hinged set of two panels—since the sitter faces our left, his right, as if looking toward another sitter or another scene. Double portraits were often presented as diptychs or triptychs—three-panel paintings which often featured a religious scene in the center, sometimes flanked by patron portraits or saints in the panels or within the center image itself. The mysterious man with the heart-shaped book may have been gazing at his wife in the other panel, or his name saint, or he might have faced a devotional scene such as the Virgin and Child or the Adoration of the Magi.

He may have been a nobleman or a Flemish merchant able to afford to commission a multi-panel painting, and he shows us another treasure—the heart-shaped book bound in red leather was probably a prayer book, no doubt quite expensive and likely handmade; printed books were more common by then, but special books like this one would be hand done, unsuited to the large cumbersome presses. Because of the church interior so delicately and accurately depicted, the sitter may have had some connection to Ste-Gudule, and his prayers may have been directed to Saint Gudula, or to his own patron saint.  

Even more curious—this painting has a near twin, also attributed to the Master of Ste-Gudule, in the National Gallery in London. In the London painting the sitter resembles the other man, similar enough to be the same man, or a son or brother; the clothing and background differ a little; the style is similar to the New York painting, but the technique in the London is less delicate, earthier, and the drawing even shows the same disproportion in the figure. Flemish artists of the time were trained in techniques that emerged from manuscript illumination—miniature, detailed, meticulous, paintings realistic in vision with polished, painstaking detail, and both paintings demonstrate that.   

The two paintings have some differences, but the heart-shaped books are nearly identical (both show differently crinkled pages, quite naturalistic). One painting might be an earlier version of the other, or partial copy, or meant to be a similar commission. The similarities are intriguing. But what is the significance of the heart-shaped book, in an age where objects in portraits often carried deliberate symbolism?

Could the book be a valentine, an allusion to love, the giving of the heart, an expression of heart’s desire? Red hearts were a favorite sentimental symbol of love and undying devotion at the time. Was the book a comment meant for a wife in the missing panel? Or was it an artist’s prop or a treasured possession of the sitter, something rare and expensive enough to show his wealth and importance?

 

Heads Up!

Andrea/Cara here, I was writing a scene in my current WIP the other day in which the heroine, who is visiting the family estate of the hero, is invited to take a walk with him around the grounds. The breeze is ruffling through the climbing roses and boxwood, and I’m about to describe the sensation she feels as it dips and darts through her tresses . . . when of course I remind myself that no proper lady would be outside without her chapeau. Drat.
 
Which got me thinking about hats—or more specifically, the headcoverings that were de rigeur for Regency heroines to wear. I find them a nuisance, both in the literary and literal sense. But after muttering a few curses, I started to think more on the subject, and realized that perhaps I was guilty of a gross generalization concerning the accessory. There were, after all, quite a range of choices for ladies of the era. And while I tend to think immediately of the typical chipstraw bonnet, ladies had, in fact a wide range of creative and imaginative headcoverings from which to pick. So I thought it would be fun to take a quick look at some of the stylish “lids” that our heroines might have sported.

Who Do We Think We Are?

Nicola here. I’ve been enjoying the current series of “Who Do You Think You Are” the BBC’s genealogy programme, very much. It’s been the usual mix of actors, singers and celebrities, each with a fascinating family history story to tell. Whether they find a royal connection, a shocking secret, a family tragedy or a black sheep ancestor, the subject matter has been very varied and interesting but what makes the programme for me is the response of the people involved. They all seem to have found it thought-provoking and have gone away different people as a result of delving into their history. In some cases it has thrown light on their own family relationships and in many it has made them think about how the lives of previous generations have made them what they are.

Aprons

Anne here, considering the humble apron.

When I was a kid, pretty much every woman I knew wore an apron when in the kitchen or elsewhere in the home. My maternal grandmother wore one almost all the time.  The apron wasn't just to protect her dress and to wipe her hands on, it carried all sorts of things; fruit and vegetables from the garden, fresh-laid eggs, pegs from the line, wood chips for the fire. When visitors came the apron would be whipped off, or if it was dirty, she'd pop on a fresh one. She had maybe a dozen aprons, some workaday, some pretty.

My mother, who was a professional woman, would get home from work, walk into the kitchen, put on an apron and get to work. She also had a number of different aprons, from the ones that covered her dress well, to pretty ones made from worn-out old dresses.  

Me? The truth is, I hardly ever put on an apron from one month to another.