Word Wenches

What We're Reading in September

Nicola here, introducing the Wenches' monthly "What We're Reading" feature, which, this month is a "What We're Watching" as well! 

Anne: I've had a pretty busy time in the last month and, apart from some rereads of old favorites, the only book of any note I've read recently is Together by Julie Cohen. A friend told me about this book, saying that it was about a romance, but was written backwards, starting at the end of a couple's life and gradually working backwards to when they first met. I was intrigued, so I bought it.

In the working backwards, the reader begins to put clues together —it's not a murder mystery, but there is a big secret to be discovered. As the cover blurb says, "Their love was unstoppable . . . Their life was a lie."

It's been a big bestseller, and I found it quite a compelling read, but in the end I'm still not sure what I think. But certainly worth a read.

The Ghosts of Jonquils

Susanna here, emerging briefly from the Depths of Deadline Hell with dancing on my mind.

Given that I’ve been working for a couple of days now on two scenes, in present and past, where my characters are dancing, it’s occurred to me that,

a) I write a lot of scenes, it seems, in which my characters are dancing; and,

b) I have a lot of favourite scenes in other writers’ books, in which their characters are dancing.

And I’m wondering if it’s something that’s just personal to me, or if it’s generally a thing we do as writers, and enjoy as readers.

In the Wake of the Vikings: Norway

by Mary Jo

As is my unfortunate custom, I hurled a manuscript into email for my editor and a few hours later left on a major vacation: in this case, a flight to Oslo where we would pick up a cruise ship in Bergen and then sail across the North Atlantic to Montreal. Which we’ve done, and it was a great way to recover from deadline panic. We saw many wonderful things, several blogs worth. I napped a lot. <G>

We sailed on a terrific Viking Ocean cruise called In the Wake of the Vikings in a brand new ship called the Viking Sky. (The Mayhem Consultant and I independently picked this itinerary out of a fat Viking catalog. Image above is from the Oslo ship museum.)

The Sky a beautiful ship with wonderful, thoughtful design at every level and I could write a blog about it, but won't because this is not an ad for Viking. <G> But here is a gorgeous horsy piece of artwork from the ship, one of many.

The Dior Exhibition

Anne here. I spent yesterday morning dazed and wandering vaguely (quite of my own accord) among crowds of other women, also dazed and emitting gasps and oohs and ahhs. And taking photos, lots of photos. Because we weren't allowed to touch. 

I did notice several very elegant men in the crowd, making notes and taking photos, but most of the men I saw were lurking glumly in corners; here a father with an empty pram, there a husband visibly practising patience, on a bench a weary-looking fellow minding a handbag and a coat.

So where was I? At a fashion show — an exhibition celebrating 70 years of Dior fashion, in Melbourne, my home town, at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). (Click on the photos for a closer view.)

Melbourne (Australia) is one of only three cities in the world that were chosen to help celebrate Dior's 70th anniversary. The other two cities are Paris and New York.

"Why Melbourne?" you may ask. Or even "Why Australia?" Well, unbeknown to most people (me included) the House of Dior has a long history of association with Australia.

Back in July, 1947, The Australian Women’s Weekly, the major women's magazine at the time, in association with the major department stores, ran a "Paris Fashions for All Parade" — 120 hand-picked fully accessorized French couturier outfits and four French models touring department stores around the country. It contained four Christian Dior original outfits from his debut collection in Paris in February that year.

If I be waspish

Not the one I saw.
The Carmel Shakespeare Festival

I went to a performance of Taming of the Shrew on Sunday. Quite an excellent, intelligent and witty performance from the American Shakespeare Center at the Blackfriars Playhouse right down the road from me in Staunton, Virginia. They had come touring to a sell-out crowd at my little Community College in the Blue Ridge.

In any case, Taming of the Shrew contains the memorable line,
“If I be waspish, best beware my sting”
and it gets a bit bawdy from there. I had been thinking about wasps, as it happens, because I have a wasp nest in the back of my yard right under the bird house.

This is one of those “Oh, how full of briers is this working-day world!” moments which is Rosalind’s line, not Kate’s, but it is also very properly my own line. After con

A wasp in amber. Not so terrible to look at

sidering several schemes I have decided not to deal with the wasps at all. I will wait till it freezes and then knock the stupid nest down. Then the ants can eat the wasps.
I feel entirely bloodthirsty and violent, but I intend to do this anyway.

This brought to mind the history of wasps and their relations with people and I decided to look into how my Regency folks would have dealt with wasp stings since I might be collecting some of my own.

Since I’m talking bugs I will just stop by for a brief nod at Charles Valentine Riley as I go by, that knowledgeable and far-sighted entomologist. He spearheaded the first US Grasshopper Commission, you know, and headed the U.S. Entomological Commission in 1876. Riley turned his back on the Big Chem of its day – pesticides based on arsenic, lead, and kerosene -- and said, he’d never “had much faith in the application to the plant or the insect of any chemical mixture.” It was the insects’ natural enemies, “that carry on their good work most effectually.”

So it is kinda like me following Riley and handing over the wasps to my allies the ants, assuming the ants come out and eat the wasps during a warm spell which is by no means assured.

But onward to the Regency.
How did they deal with wasp sting?

In The New Family Receipt-book, 1811, John Murray says, “rubbing of the part stung, with a slice of onion, will give immediate ease.” Or they can be treated by applying “oil of tartar or solution of potash, and it will give instant ease; as also well bruised mallows.”

Oil of tartar is what we call cream of tartar when we use it in cooking nowadays. It’s a byproduct of wine making apparently. Potash is literally pot ash, the ash from charred vegetables. It would have been used as a fertilizer in the Regency, being all full of potassium goodness.
Mallow is a plant family. Here’s one.
 
Murray adds, “Sweet oil, applied immediately, cures the sting of wasps or bees.” Sweet oil being olive oil in this case.

And “The immediate application of Eau du Luce to many persons who have been stung by wasps, has caused the pain to subside in a few seconds, and after a few minutes all inflammation ceased.”

I know you are going to ask about Eau de Luce so I have this ready for you.

Per The Domestic Encyclopedia of A. F. M. Willich, Eau De Luce is a ... "liquid volatile soap with a pungent smell." To make it, you dissolve white soap in alcohol, add oil of amber, (which is what you get when you heat amber till it melts,) and volatile spirit of sal ammoniac. (That seems to be ammonium hydroxide and ammonium chloride. Quicklime is involved in this somehow and I wouldn’t mess with it myself.)

You can perfume your Eau de Luce with lavender if that’s how you roll.

Willich goes on to say the use of Eau de Luce “as an external remedy is extensive; for it has been employed for curing the bites of vipers, wasps, bees, gnats, ants, and other insects, for burns and even the bite of a mad-dog, though not always with uniform success.”

Hmmm. I imagine not.

Mostly though, Eau de Luce was used as very upscale smelling salts. It came in a lovely gold-decorated bottle. Nothing like a gold bottle to rouse you from a stupor.

As one heroine put it:

“I was indeed ready to faint! I was never so ill. The men, who all condemned Lord Merton’s rashness, ran for drops, &c. &c. Bellville held one of my hands in his, and with the other, an eau de luce bottle to my nose. His tender solicitude, and repeated assurances that he was not much hurt, soon restored me.”

Moving from remedies that include melted amber to the more mundane sort:

“A good remedy for the sting of wasps and bees, is to apply to the part affected common culinary salt, moistened with a little water. Even in a case where the patient had incautiously swallowed a wasp in a draught of beer, and been stung by it in the windpipe, the alarming symptoms that ensued were almost instantly relieved by swallowing repeated doses of water, saturated with salt.” John Murray

If I find myself going head to head with wasps, I will keep a canister of salt handy.

One final word from the scienc-y folks of the Regency:

“Various kinds of oil, honey, ammonia, spirit of wine, and several other reputed specifics, appear to deserve no such character, since they are found, after unprejudiced trials, to have no power of neutralizing the venom, nor of appeasing the actual pain arising from the sting. ... [The best treatment is] The part is afterwards to be covered with snow, or bathed with ice-cold water, or some cooling sedative lotion. In short, the case is to be treated on common antiphlogistic principles, experience having fully proved that no specific has yet been discovered for the sting of the bee, and other venomous insects.”
The Cyclopedia: Or Universal Dictionary, Volume 38, 1819, Abraham Rees

 

So. What are your antiphlogistic principles?

How do you treat any wasp stings or bee stings that come into your life?

Speaking Objectively . . .

Andrea/Cara here, musing today about objects. Allow me to explain . . . The other day I was rooting through my shelves looking for a reference book when I stopped to thumb through a completely different book. (This happens a lot to me!) The History of the World in 100 Objects, is a great favorite of mine. Written by the head of the British Museum, it’s a delightful and fascinating look at how individual objects, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, tell such grand stories, and can be such a powerful way to bring history alive.

Wonder Wenches

Susan here. One of my favorite movies this summer was Wonder Woman, directed by Patty Jenkins and personified by the amazing Gal Gadot (if you haven't seen it yet, the DVD release is next week!). Inspired by Diana Prince, Amazon princess, and her gifts, determination, compassion, great costume and golden lasso of truth, the Wenches recently took a break from writing to consider what super powers we might like to have ourselves – and why.

The extraordinary power itself, whatever it may be, isn’t as appealing as the chance to go beyond the ordinary, experience something magical or mythical, elevate some useful quality or ability, and step in to help others. Without effecting some change or benefit, what really is the fun and reward of a super power? Cooking dinner with heat vision might get a little old after a while (and we have microwaves for that), and stirring up a whirlwind to rake the autumn leaves would be cool—but much more fun to be able to do that for all your neighbors’ yards too. As writers, we can contribute stories—and while writing isn’t a super power (though super stamina is required to produce an entire manuscript!), it does make a difference for readers.

There’s a dark side to super powers too; every super hero, male and female, has a weakness or vulnerability or a limitation. They are not perfect. “I've always liked that the Statue of Liberty isn't a ‘pretty’ woman but a strong one,” says Wench Anne Gracie. Super beings in comics and films have much in common with mythological beings, who often had complexities of strengths and weaknesses. Super heroes, male and female, are a modern equivalent of gods and goddesses. 

Strength, wisdom, integrity, courage—beings with super abilities, in every story and every film, are often very human, if not completely in their DNA, in their natures—and that humanity, combined with some super power, can create extraordinary magic. And that is hugely appealing.

If you could have a super power, what would it be? How about your costume and/or special attribute? Let's save the world, Wenches!  Or at least bring some improvement to our little corners of the world.

Mary Jo--

The original super heroine who looks like a woman with real physical power was Xena, Warrior Princess.  Xena had muscles under her bustier!

Pat—

Always the contrarian, I’ve never liked flashy superheroes in their tight costumes that shout “Here I am, look at me!” I’m a quiet, reserved person, so I think of librarians as superheroes, with the ability to open new worlds to anyone who asks. Or teachers—man, there are real heroes! I could ask for patience to be a teacher as my superpower.

But if I get any superpower I want, then I want one that produces peace. There has to be a downside to every magic, so I suppose I wouldn’t be able to fly around, sprinkling peace dust, but maybe I could take myself to places that need to see an end to fighting and sprinkle peace dust on their leaders. Or shoot them with it. <G>

Footsteps

Every now and then a reader writes to tell me that they’ve gone on vacation to one of the settings I’ve used in my books, and have sat where my characters sat or have walked on the same path, and I’m always amazed and incredibly flattered that someone would go to the trouble of doing that.

Not that I don’t understand.

In the spring of 2007, I took a research trip to Greece, for the half-finished sequel to Every Secret Thing (which was coming along fine until the idea for The Winter Sea took over, and since then it’s been puddling along in fits and starts between the other novels…)

My mother came with me, because Greece was somewhere she’d wanted to go nearly all her life, and since we share a love of Mary Stewart's novels—some of the best of which are set in Greece—the trip, for us both, had the air of a pilgrimage.

So on our way from Athens to the island where my story would be set, we detoured north and went to Delphi.

Into the Woods

Nicola here. After the beach and the sea, a woodland is probably Angus’s favourite place for a walk. I’m not a dog, obviously, but I can imagine just how exciting it might be for him; so many sights, sounds and particularly smells that are different from the garden or the street. There is something special about the woods in lots of different ways: places to run, places to hide, secrets and surprises just around the corner.

In the fairy stories, woods are often scary places. I remember Hansel and Gretel as one of my least favourite fairy tales because of the sinister cottage in the woods. And doesn’t Little Red Riding Hood meet the wolf in a wood? Woodland is portrayed as a wild, dark place that is full of danger. The same thing happens in other books from Harry Potter, to Lord of the Rings, to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. So often a wood is a threatening place. Often we get lost there.

New Zealand— a whirlwind tour

Anne here, dashing in with a very quick blog — I'm at my third conference in four weeks, and have revised a book in between, so I'm time poor and brain-dizzy. 

The middle of those conferences was in New Zealand (as any of you who read my Hobbiton post would realize) so today I'm going to give you a quick glimpse of some New Zealand places I visited.( Click on the photos for a larger view)  

It was early spring, and I'd only ever visited NZ in the summer, so I kept stopping to take photos of the flowersI kept spotting in people's gardens.

The RWNZ conference was in Rotorua, a site of bubbling hot mud and gushing geysers. The first hint that you're getting close is the smell of sulphur in the air,  like rotten egg gas. (All through the conference I kept thinking of a boy called Lynton Hastings, who I went to school with, and who was notorious for concocting bad smells in science class.) So that's what Rotorua smells like. (Below is the view from my hotel.)

The shawl of beauty and grace

An old familiar friend of a painting, but do we ever look at the shawl?

Joanna here, talking about that fashion accessory of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, the shawl.

Why shawls? We wear form-fitted, sleeved outer garments mostly — coats and sweaters and parkas and anoraks and Macintoshes — in the Twenty-first Century and feel pleased and practical doing so. Why did folks spend centuries throwing loose garments around themselves that didn’t button up and had to be draped and fidgeted with in a manner that may strike us as awkward?

I think an ideal of feminine beauty was at the root of it. The drape and swirl of a shawl, the varied possibilities with all their minute adjustments were alluring to the watcher. Displaying the shawl was an art, and this length of silk or wool might well be the most expensive object a woman wore.

So let’s talk paisley, since we’re talking shawls.

Paisley is based on a repeated, teardrop-shaped design pattern called a bota or boteh – a word that means  “shrub” or “cluster of leaves” in Persian.

A decorative Persian tile from 1262. The boteh design comes from such roots

 This boteh is an ancient pattern, widespread in rugs, paintings, and tiles. It's an abstract shape that probably comes from the simplification of many sorts of feathers, fruit, flowers and so on in older designs. That is, there's no one origin. It's derived from many complexities that lost detail as they were copied and recopied.

In the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries the East India Company imported these Indian designs to Europe where they became immensely popular. Soldiers returning from service in the East brought back lovely, expensive scarves of silk and soft Kashmir (cashmere) wool to their sweethearts and family. The British version of the scarves might cost more than 20 pounds. Sir Walter Scott’s French bride Charlotte Carpentier was given a Kashmir shawl in 1797 for her trousseau that cost 50 guineas, a huge sum in those days.

A fine shawl wrapping up mother and child 1825

Period portraits are full of these Kashmiri scarves gracefully swirled round the shoulders of women in flimsy low cut, high-waisted dresses. The survival of generations of scantily clad British beauties doubtless depended on these lengths of wool.

British wool and silk paisley shawl showing boteh 1810

Almost as soon as the imported scarves arrived, they were copied enthusiastically by European weavers, among them the craftsmen of the Scottish city of Paisley, so much so that the Persian design ended up named "paisley" after that city in Renfrewshire, Scotland, far, far from the exotic mountains and plains of the East.

The handlooms and, after 1820, Jacquard looms, of the misty north produced quite a good imitation of the original Indian product. But it was  not a perfect likeness.

Throughout the import period, imported Kashmiri shawls were more expensive and preferred over the British version. The colors were more varied. Even at the height of Scots weaving they were using a mere 15 colors as opposed to the more than 40 colors used in the Eastern imports. The quality of foreign weaving superior, and the fabric itself was lighter. British shawls were made from sheep’s wool. Kashmiri scarves, from softer, more supple, more lustrous goat’s hair. And Kashmiri weavers used the “twill tapestry technique”.

Those of you in the know about weaving technique will recognize that this means the horizontal (weft) threads of the pattern do not run all the way across the fabric but are woven back and forth around the vertical (warp) threads to where the color is needed again. This is the way Europeans weave tapestries. And no, I knew nothing about weaving technique before I looked this up.

Pat Rice - Love & Laughter

Anne here and today I'm interviewing fellow wench, Patricia Rice.
Pat, you're launching a new "Regency Love and Laughter" collection of some of your earlier books and novellas. What a lovely idea. We need more love and laughter in these difficult times, and I personally love it when authors reissue their earlier stories, many of which I've missed.

Anne: The first "book" in the collection —Crossed in Love—is an anthology made up of three novellas and a short story. It contains 1) The Borrowed Groom, 2) Deceiving Appearances, 3) Fathers and Daughters and 4) Lady Invisible.
What, if anything links these stories?

Pat: In each story, the characters are searching for or have thought they found love, only to lose it and despair. I particularly love the heroine in “Borrowed Groom” who fears she’ll never find love or even have a life because she’s crippled, and her parents won’t allow her out of her sight. But when opportunity is dangled right before her eyes, she grabs it and runs and to heck with the consequences.

Anne: Sounds gorgeous! Following the anthology are three more full-length novels;  Mad Maria's Daughter, Artful Deceptions and All a Woman Wants. I must confess, I think Mad Maria's Daughter is a most intriguing title.

Pat: Don’t you love the titles and fantasies we used to get away with back when the genre was in its infancy? Originally, only the mother was mad, the heroine was blind, but my editor refused to accept a heroine with another “disability of the month,” so I had to make the daughter potentially mad. Really difficult to obtain the same impact as those scenes where the heroine could tell the difference between the twins because of her hyper-senses!