Word Wenches

What We're Reading—October

Anne here, hosting this month's What We're Reading post. As always there's a lovely range of books for all tastes. And just a reminder -- these are not promo posts; they're genuinely what we've read and enjoyed in the last month. 

We'll start with Pat, who says: I'm on a hunt for light-hearted, humorous, feel-good books these days, so I'm over the moon when I find one.

180 SECONDS by Jessica Park qualifies, even though I suspect it's probably called a New Adult romance since the protagonists are in college. But this isn’t about the normal trials and tribulations of overworked, under-loved students. The protagonist Allison has been in foster care all her life, until she was adopted by a gay dad when she was sixteen. She’s closed off, shut down, prepared to peel out of the life of anyone who gets close. She does her best to avoid people entirely. She wants to love her adopted dad, who is a real gem, but she can’t even open his care packages. And then in one freakish moment when she’s forced herself to go into town, she’s caught up in an internet video where she has to stare at a boy for 180 seconds. That scene alone is worth reading the book. Esben, the hero of this story, is almost too good to be true, but he has his major hidden flaws as well. The romance is a rollicking ride of self-discovery and interconnectedness of the internet and how it drives the lives of these kids. So, it’s almost fantasy, but it’s fun fantasy. For a feel good read, try this one. 

Mary Jo read and recommends  David Rosenfelt's Andy Carpenter Series & Dogtripping

The Romany in the Regency

Thomas Sully, Gypsie Maid, 1839

The Romani — the Sinti, Manouche, Bohemians, Roma, Gitano, Gypsies — were a well-known presence in Europe during the Regency. They would have been a familiar sight, travelling the road or camping in woodlands, from Scotland to Hungary.

We meet them from time to time in Regency Romances, sheltering the runaway heroine in their wagons, being colorful as they dance around the campfire, or welcoming the hero, who owns the land they're allowed to camp on.

As a people, they originated in northern India. Educated Regency folks might well be aware of this. The idea would have been floating around scholarly circles. 

Gypsies in Guy Mannering 1815
with dog

The German scholar Grellmann published a ground-breaking linguistic study in 1783 that demonstrated similarities between the spoken language of the Romani and Sanskrit.

For those of you who do not have the information just at your fingertips, Sanskrit is an ancient language of India in which classical Indian epic poems, like the Rigveda, are written and from which many northern Indian languages are derived.

Modern genetic studies suggest the Roma originated from a single group in northwestern India. Rom living today are closely related throughout Europe. Over seventy percent of males belong to a single genetic lineage that is unique to the Rom.

Lessons in Longitude

Andrea here, thinking about . . . Time. This month, most of us in the U.S. turn the clock back an hour for Daylight Savings Time (I don’t know about you, but I very much dislike the darkness that settles in around 5 pm in winter.) Now, where does that hour go? Yes, I know that we get it back in Spring, but it seems a cavalier attitude to play games with the ticking of the Universe.

My mulling on this has been amplified because I’ve been thinking of working in marine chronometers in a future Wrexford & Sloane mystery book. I happen to love antique mechanical wristwatches, as I think they’re both beautiful and functional. The intricate inner workings are exquisite works of art—for me it’s very cool when functional objects can also be intrinsically beautiful.

But back to marine chronometers! From the first stirrings of humanity, time is an elemental concept that regulates so many facets of our existence—our age, the cycle of the seasons, how calculate speed and distance . . . The first really precise timepiece was the pendulum clock, invented in 1656 by Christiaan Huygens (shown above), a Dutch scientist who was inspired by Galileo’s experiments with pendulums.

A Tale of Two Travellers

Susanna here, packing and gathering things for a research trip for the new novel, which has me here pondering travel in general, and how different people can visit the same place and walk the same streets and yet come away with such divergent impressions.

I had this illustrated perfectly not long ago while searching for historical details in traveller's narratives of Portofino in the first years of the eighteenth century. In those days, Portofino, Italy, was not yet the grand playground of the rich and famous that it would turn into in the mid-twentieth century. It was a place that travellers put into when they had to, if the weather or the winds were uncooperative. There wasn't much to see—a little fort, a lighthouse, a handful of houses with black slate roofs, a church, a couple of inns, and a good, sheltered harbour.

The Two Elizabeths of Ashdown House

Nicola here. Today it is my great pleasure to welcome to the blog Julia Gasper, a historian and author whom I met through a shared interest in Craven family history. Today Julia is talking about one of the Georgian Lady Cravens, Elizabeth Berkeley, whom she intriguingly describes as a "writer, feminist and European." Julia also draws some interesting parallels between Elizabeth Stuart, for whom Ashdown was built, and her namesake Elizabeth Berkeley.

"I greatly enjoyed reading Nicola Cornick’s novel, House of Shadows. However, one thing I found worrying was being told that, in this fictional world, Ashdown House had been burnt down in the early nineteenth century. This really bothered me. (And a lot of other people - Ed!) Every time it was referred to, I felt uneasy in case I might go over there and find that this exquisitely beautiful seventeenth-century mansion in Oxfordshire really had vanished!

I am happy to assure you all that Ashdown House, near Lambourn, is still there and owned by the National Trust. I visited it when I was writing my biography of Elizabeth Craven, the Georgian writer, who lived there in the 1760s, when she was a young bride. It was her first marital home, and she shared it with her husband, William, 6^th Baron Craven, heir to the considerable estates and wealth of the Craven family. His mother and his two sisters lived there with them.

Elizabeth Craven was born Lady Elizabeth Berkeley, younger daughter of the Earl of Berkeley, and she was married in 1767 at the tender age of sixteen to Lord Craven. She had little choice in the matter. She had seven children before parting from her husband rather traumatically in 1782 and going to live in France, to escape the scandal and gossip that always in this period accompanied aristocratic divorces. She did not disappear into obscurity by any means, but travelled around the whole of Europe, to Italy, Austria, Poland, Russia, the Crimea, Turkey, Greece and Romania, writing about everything she saw and everyone she met, from galley slaves in Genoa to the Empress Catherine the Great. She was a passionate person whose life included many love-affairs, and she had to be strong to stand up to the social disapproval this often attracted.

Elizabeth Craven always loved reading and acting. She wrote plays, poems, novels and travelogues, as well as a remarkable early feminist work called Letters to Her Son, in which she condemned the laws that made a wife obey her husband and gave him so many unjust powers over her. She advised her son  - another William Craven  - to treat his wife with respect and sensitivity, as an equal companion, and never to remind her that he was, in the eyes of the law, her master. If he did that, they would both be very much happier. It is pleasant to record that he followed her advice, with total success.

House of Shadows tells the story of Princess Elizabeth, daughter of King James I, and her secret love for an English cavalier. Elizabeth married Frederick, Elector of the Palatinate and became for a brief time Queen of Bohemia. But she and Frederick lost their throne after only one year and were driven out of their kingdom, and so she acquired the rather melancholy title of the Winter Queen. One of Frederick’s most loyal supporters was the gallant soldier William, 1^st Lord Craven, who put his sword and his fortune at the service of the exiled monarchs. William fell in love with the Winter Queen and she returned his passion, but their difference in rank was a serious barrier. It is said that they married in secret, after many years of concealment and yearning.

Did any lady in the annals of courtly love ever set her faithful admirer a more gruesome task than that of retrieving a lost treasure from the coffin of her dead husband? That is what Elizabeth of Bohemia demanded from William, Lord Craven, and of course he did not refuse. He was hers to command, and the scene of the novel in which he performs the deed is dark and splendidly macabre.

Ashdown House was one of William’s gifts to his princess, who had lost her own home, and loved hunting. It was built in the 1660s and the first thing that strikes you when you approach is its extreme elegance and air of romantic aloofness, surrounded as it is by miles of green parkland and farmland. This was once a mediaeval deer park and it is close to the Berkshire Downs. When it was built it was actually in Berkshire, but by dint of a boundary change Oxfordshire managed to acquire it.

Ashdown was not the only house that Lord Craven built to receive his royal beloved. He also built her a far larger house, a veritable palace, at Hampstead Marshall, another one of his Berkshire estates, but that has not survived. In the century between the first Lord Craven and the sixth, Ashdown House was used as a minor residence, a convenient hunting-estate, not too far from London, where deer, pheasants, hares and other wild game could be shot and either eaten on the spot or taken up to London for a dinner-party at the Cravens’ house in Mayfair.

In her Memoirs, Elizabeth Craven says that she was very interested in the history of the Craven family. She looked at documents in the family archives, and she was sure the Queen of Bohemia had married the first Lord Craven. When I was writing my biography of her, I had a strong feeling that she was fascinated by this earlier Elizabeth, her namesake who also married a William Craven. 

There are many other things they had in common. They were related, because Elizabeth Craven was actually descended, via the Berkeley and Richmond lines, from King Charles I of England, brother of the Queen of Bohemia. So Elizabeth of Bohemia was her great-great-great-great-aunt. Both women married at sixteen, both had large families of children. Both were women of considerable intelligence and strength of character, a strength they needed as both suffered great upheavals and reversals in their life. The Winter Queen had to endure her husband’s defeats in he Thirty Years War and the loss of his hereditary domains in the Palatinate. Elizabeth Craven had to suffer cruel persecution from the prigs and the gossips when her husband decided to part from her, and most painful of all, she was forcibly separated from six of her seven children. All of her four daughters were kept in the care of their father, and forbidden to write to her, a wound that was as humiliating as it was distressing.

Both Elizabeths, curiously enough, married minor German princes. After many outrageous love-affairs, including one with William Beckford, the author and art collector, Elizabeth Craven found herself a second husband, the Margrave of Anspach, who made over his little principality to Prussia and retired to England. She married him in 1792 and until his death in 1806 they lived at Hammersmith near London. They made their home a hub for artists, musicians, actors, unconventional people and French emigrées fleeing from the Revolution. Elizabeth had a private theatre where the performances became celebrated. After the Margrave’s death she retired to Naples to spend her last years in quiet seclusion.

When we compare their portraits, it is not too fanciful to see some resemblance between these two Elizabeths, who were both admired for their brains as well as their beauty.

My intuition that Elizabeth Craven was fascinated by the Queen of Bohemia, whose destiny in so many ways resembled her own, was finally confirmed in a surprising way. After I had finished writing the biography, and published it, I discovered a lost novel by Elizabeth Craven, called The Witch and the Maid of Honour. It is set mainly at Coombe Abbey, one of the Craven properties, and the Princess Elizabeth, daughter of James I, features in it as one of the characters. A tournament at court to celebrate her wedding to the Elector Frederick is one of the high points of the book. The Princess Elizabeth is shown at exactly the age Elizabeth Craven was when she arrived at Ashdown House in 1767, and learned about the history of the Craven family. I am now in the process of editing this book, which may be the very first historical novel ever written in the English language, to bring it out in a more accessible form so that it finally gets some of the attention it deserves.

The Winter Queen bequeathed to Lord Craven many wonderful portraits of the Stuart royal family, and many of them can be seen still at Ashdown House. To Elizabeth Craven the writer, these were her distant relatives too. 

Elizabeth Craven: Writer, Feminist and European by Julia Gasper is published by Vernon Press 2017 - ISBN 9781622732753 is now out in paperback and E-book formats.

Some of Elizabeth Craven’s more unusual works are available here:

The Modern Philosopher, Letters to Her Son and Verses on the Siege of Gibraltar, by Elizabeth Craven, edited by Julia Gasper.

Cambridge Scholars Press, 2017.

You can find out more about Elizabeth Craven and the eighteenth-century world she lived in on Julia's blog ELIZABETH CRAVEN AND HER WORLD

Thank you very much to Julia for a fascinating blog piece and for sharing her knowledge about the two Elizabeths with us today! 

Another Cover Story: One Perfect Rose

 by Mary Jo

In a perfect world, every book would have a perfect harmony of story, title, and cover. Of course the world isn't perfect, even with a book named One Perfect Rose.

It's often difficult to recall how I've come up with a story, but I actually remember the origin of the plot for OPR. I had been writing my Fallen Angels series, which was built around four men who had attended Eton and became close as brothers because they all needed a family. Other friends appeared so the series got longer as more intriguing men appeared on the scene.

History of Jury Duty

I’m on call for jury duty, and while I wouldn’t mind sitting through a trial, this kind of thing never comes at a convenient time. We ought to be able to pick our jury weeks!

Anyway, I thought I’d see how long we’ve been plugged into a jury system. Basically, we know the Athenians around 507 BCE, with their democratic system, did everything by the people. Juries of 500 men (of course) were selected every day to rule on criminal and civil accusations and crimes. Sounds like they had complaining neighbors and teen hoodlums aplenty even back then.

A more modern form of this was developed by Germanic tribes where they chose men of good character to investigate crimes (the beginning of the idea of a grand jury) and judge the accused (petit jury).

The Saxons adopted a similar system by 978 AD. One of Alfred the Great’s Dooms (laws) required that 12 men from every 100 were to accuse perpetrators of crimes and pass judgment on them. So without a police force, juries acted as the law—the perfect occupation for the busybody sorts.

Wenches and the Wild

 Joanna here, bringing you tales of Wenchly encounters with wild things.  We Wenches had been chatting by email about chickens and copperheads, as one does.

Mary Jo, first up, brings us her stories from further to the the Wild Side:

I love animals and grew up on a farm, but I have no tales of devil red hens, mega-roosters, or sinuous copperheads.  There have been plenty of cats and dogs in my life, and my woodsy suburban neighborhood has lots of squirrels and chipmunks and deer and foxes and bunnies.  (I hope those last two don't meet up often!) 

But for real drama, I'll have to turn to Botswana.  Two years ago, we did a safari there after I spoke at a conference in Johannesburg, and it was great.  We traveled several vast nature preserves in open sided safari trucks.  The wildlife there is not tame, but many of the animals have become accustomed to the trucks and pretty much ignore their human visitors as long as we behave.  So a leopard ambled by a few feet away and lionesses lounged in the dirt roads, supremely confident.  

But my most dramatic encounter was our last night in one of the three safari camps we stayed in.  This particular camp housed guests in glamorous tents.  (Hence, "glamping.")  The camps were completely dark when we returned to our quarters after dinner, and we were told to always have a guide escort us back.  On that last night, I was walking ahead of the Mayhem Consultant and our guide, only a single flashlight to guide our path through the African night. 

As I neared our tent, I heard something rustling in the underbrush.  It didn’t sound large  but it could have been a hyena or some other critter I didn't want to startle.  I returned to our guide and said there's something up there, it didn't sound like a big beast like an elephant, but he might want to check it out.  He did and came back and said calmly, "It's an elephant."

Sure enough, standing smack dab in front of the entrance to our tent, maybe four feet from the canvas, an elephant was chomping on some greenery.  I thought we'd retreat to the headquarters until the elephant moved on, but our guide just said that we could get in through the end entrance of the tent. Oooh-kay, if he thought it was safe… 

I unzipped the end door entry and we went inside.  (I peeked out the front entrance and saw the vast curved back of the elephant silhouetted against the stars, and felt the presence of that great bulk just a few feet away.)

For the next half hour or so we could hear the elephant brushing around the canvas sides as it continued to foraged.  I wasn't frightened but I was wary.  The Mayhem Consultant wanted his shower so he took it.  ("brush, brush, brush, a crunch of a branch, brush, brush, brush…)  I didn't want to be caught starkers if the elephant absented-mindedly took down part of our tent, but that didn't happen.  Eventually the elephant wandered off and all was calm.

But I didn't forget that encounter with a Wild Thing!

Birthdays in History

The Birthday Cake, Pancraz Koerle, 1875, private collection

Susan here. I had a birthday this week, great fun, with cake and candles and lovely notes from family and friends – which got me thinking about birthdays through history, and what do we do differently, or the same, now? 

A birth would naturally be something to mark and remember in any historical culture, particularly where calendars were kept or some acknowledgement of days and seasons existed. And birthdays are a perfect complement to the study of astrology, which has its own very long history.

While it’s a solid guess that even the earliest cultures noted significant dates, and so perhaps births, possibly the earliest references to birthdays are in the Bible. In Genesis, an Egyptian pharaoh is said to have celebrated his birthday by “lifting up the heads” of a baker and a few others (let’s assume that meant he liked their cakes and elevated their status, or allowed them to look up in his presence, rather than lopping off heads and lifting them high). King Herod famously celebrated his birthday by watching the daughter of Herodias, Herod’s wife—often identified as Salomé—dance for him. In return, he rewarded her (thereby giving a gift on his birthday) by asking her what she wanted; she replied “the head of John the Baptist.”

It’s unknown whether these early birthday references were specifically natal days, or the “birth” of the king or the pharaoh on their coronation day. That’s harder for historians to determine.  The ancient Persians, according to Herodotus, loved birthdays best of all holidays, and rich and poor celebrated with feasts piled high on their tables, the groaning boards of the wealthy piled higher than modest ones, but both apparently featured lots of meats.   

The Greeks celebrated birthdays by associating them with the goddess Artemis, celebrating her feast on the same day each month, 12 times a year, with mooncakes, or small honeyed cakes, with a candle, as an offering to the goddess. Romans took note of birthdays with prayers and offerings to the gods, perhaps similar to Artemis and her mooncakes, as Roman writers note cakes of wheat and honey, along with cheese and wine—but only for guys. Roman women did not get much attention on their birthdays.   

Almost certainly, Roman astrologers were casting natal charts, particularly for significant families, along with horoscopes relevant to the plans of emperors and others in power. For instance, a second century Roman astrologer created a global map so that he could more accurately determine the relationship of the stars to a person’s specific birth place (and likely birth date and time as well). The emperor Augustus had an astrologer outline his claim to power, and Emperor Tiberius employed a court astrologer as well.

American pies & Australian football

Anne here.
The other day I took time out from my writing frenzy (deadline looming) and went to my annual Aussie Rules Football Grand Final barbecue. Friends of mine have held it for the last 20+ years, and I never miss. It's spring here, and every year their garden provides a wonderful welcome.

The barbie (barbecue) starts at lunch time, then the footie (football) starts at 2.30. It finishes some time around 5, and then there's more nibbling and grazing and then around 8 or 9, more snags (sausages — yes, you're getting a crash course in Australian slang) come out and the leftovers are polished off and the party continues on into the night.

It's always a good night — even though our team, Collingwood, lost by a whisker when the other team scored a goal in the last few minutes of the game. 

We were sad about the loss, but there's always a big fire in the back yard, over which we barbecue, and into which we stare, and around which we talk and that's always a wonderful part of the night — for me, anyway. I do love a good fire. And I get to catch up with people I only see once a year.

There are always musicians and live music (generally Irish) and good company and good food — everyone brings salads or desserts or whatever to share. I bring the same thing every year — two big cheese and leek pies — sort of Greek — and get into trouble if I try to vary it. (And no, that's not the American pie in the heading. Read on . . . )

Strokes of Genius

Andrea here, musing today about art and history, two subjects near and dear to my heart. One of the fundamental reasons I love the Regency era is because it was a time of challenging of the old order and served as a catalyst for new ways of thinking about all aspects of society—the birth of the Modern! Art was no exception. The blossoming of Romanticism—individuals suddenly free to express an emotional reaction to the world around them—ignited a whole new realm of creativity.

Color, brushstrokes, draftsmanship—the traditional ways of depicting subjects gave way to experimentation and imagination. Turner began dabbling in a bold new way that inspired Impressionism. And the French artist Delacroix . . . hmmm, well, Delacroix has been a conundrum to art critics over the years. But a grand new retrospective of his work currently on view at the Met in New York City, is generating raves and new appreciation of what a revolutionary artist he was. (You can listen to the Met curator of the exhibit give a short talk on Delacroix’s genius here.)

Before the Beginning

Susanna here.

When I was first published, in 1994, everyone I talked to—agents and editors—had an opinion on prologues. Essentially, all the opinions came down to: “Don’t write them.”

The late Elmore Leonard even placed it second on his famous “10 Rules of Writing” list: “Avoid Prologues”.

Your readers don’t need two beginnings, I was told. Any backstory that’s important can be worked into the main part of the novel. Just get in there and start with the main characters in mid-action—don’t clutter things with prefaces and prologues. It’s old-fashioned.

And yet…

The Power of Numbers

Nicola here. A short and hopefully sweet blog from me today as I’m heading off on holiday to Scotland soon and am surrounded by dog and human packing and am trying to work out how much food we will all need for 2 weeks in remote locations!

Anyway, back to the blog, and a writing friend mentioned to me a week or so ago that she thought numbers in book titles were becoming a trend. Just as there had been “girl” titles, so there are now number titles, and a glance at the UK charts seems to support this: Joanna Cannon’s new book is called “Three Things about Elsie” and Jonas Johannsen has written “The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred Year Old Man” to name but two.