History Hoydens

Pam Rosenthal, RITA Winner!!!

2009-07-18T22:24:00.000-07:00

I know I said *fingers crossed*, and I'm THRILLED to tell you all it worked. Our own Pam Rosenthal is the 2009 winner of Romance Writers of America's RITA Award for Best Historical Romance. If you haven't read The Edge of Impropriety, here's yet another reason to pick up this wonderful book.

You can find it in print at Amazon, or in eBook form at Fictionwise.

For me, it was all about the appeal of the sexy professor . . . if you share my thing for smart, sexy, slightly obtuse heroes, this book is for you.

Remedies for heartbreak and everything else

2009-07-17T10:36:00.000-07:00

Nothing is as enlightening for me as old-time (1880's) advice for women. Mrs. Dunwoody’s Excellent Instructions for Homekeeping, a book of “Timeless Wisdom and Practical Advice” offers answers to all of life’s little wrinkles. This volume, by Miriam Lukken, is drawn from the author’s deep-south grandmother and her great-grandmother’s rules for living as a lady should.

“Yankees don’t know any better, so always be kind to them.” [Aunt Middle Mary]

From the very basic topics of getting rid of ants (wash the shelves with salt and water; then use mint tea, citrus juice, salt, ground cinnamon, or boric acid for repelling the critters. Sprinkle salt in their path. Or mix 2/3 cup of water, 1/3 cup of white vinegar and 2-3 tablespoons of dish soap and wash their marching path) to natural mosquito repellent (dab lavender oil on your pulse points), Mrs. Dunwoody has a solution for every one of life’s little problems.

Mice control: stop up openings to the house with steel wool and sprinkle cayenne pepper or peppermint extract around entry holes; mice hate these smells.

For a time-saving makeshift measurer you can carry around with you, measure your own index finger ( mine is 3 inches), hand (7 inches) and elbow to middle fingertip (16 inches).

Care of books: dust; open and fan the pages; keep books dry. If they smell musty, put them outdoors in the hot sun for an afternoon and fan the pages frequently. Damp pages should be sprinkled with cornstarch.

I was particularly intrigued by Captain Clementine’s Mint Julep recipe, since the version I was taught by my non-southern daddy knocks my guests onto the floor. Captain Clementine instructs: “Put a dozen sprigs of mint into a tumbler; add a spoonful of white sugar and equal proportions of peach and common brandy to fill up one-third. Add shaved ice to fill the tumbler and drink as the ice melts.”

Remember that old trick your grandmother did to test oven temperature? Hold your palm close to where the food will be cooking and count: “one-and-one, two-and-two,” and so on for as many seconds as you can hold your hand still: 1 second or less = very hot (450 to 500 degrees); 4-5 seconds = moderate (350 to 400 degrees). I suppose this method would work particularly well with campfire ovens.

And, at last, an illustrated “proper” table setting, complete with correctly placed napkin, water and wine glasses, 3 forks, 2 spoons, and 2 knives (one for butter). Fork and spoon instructions: select from the outside in toward your plate.

The proper tea party table is covered with an embroidered linen cloth trimmed with lace; teacups and saucers rest with the spoon in each saucer; plates or pretty doilies exhibit thin slices of lemon, small cookies, cakes or sandwiches, with the teapot just in front of them. Cream pitcher and sugar bowl should be within convenient reach. The hostess pours the tea and allows the guests to put in sugar and cream for themselves. If you expect many visitors, you might want to ask a friend to pour for you.

Remember this old saying for which way to turn a screw: “Lefty Loosey, Rightly Tightly.”

Becoming a Belle: A lady is never rude to anyone. A lady will not dress in an odd way as to attract attention or remarks. A lady is kind to all people and carries with her a congenial atmosphere which puts all at ease. A lady does not smoke, or bite her fingernails. A lady is never late (lest it give her suitors time to count up her faults). A lady’s integrity is never at question. A lady possesses a sense of humor and can easily laugh at herself, but never at others.

Cure for a Broken Heart: Allow 1 to 2 days to sulk, cry, and pout, followed by 2 days of rest and 1 day of exercise. On the sixth day, make a list of your blessings, talents, and accomplishments. Display this list on your mirror. On the seventh day, put your trust in the Lord, carry on, and do the next thing. This too shall pass. [Might work for rejection letters, too?]

RWA Convention Week

2009-07-14T07:19:00.000-07:00

Things are going to be quiet here this week, as many of the Hoydens are at the Romance Writers of America's yearly convention (with their fingers and toes crossed that our own Pam Rosenthal wins a RITA for best historical romance!).

Umberto Eco, Barbara Cartland, and Me: Saying I Love You in Historical Romance

2009-07-10T04:00:00.000-07:00

Before I became a romance writer, I hadn't read romance for quite a number of years. And yet, on the strength of my memories and the buzz of my own more recent erotic writing, I somehow had the chutzpah to believe in the stories I was imagining, to feel they were mine, to trust my gut and stumble on in.

Beginner's mind, the Buddhists call it. I think I'll always write better when I feel a little like a stranger in a strange land. But I can still surprise myself (and scandalize some among my fellow writers) by how little I know about the genre and the market.

A recent case in point being when a friend remarked that surely most romance novels must be historicals.

Well, I thought, at least I know better than that.

No, I told my friend. In fact the biggest percentage of published romances are contemporaries (single-title and series, though I doubtless did a lousy job of explaining what a series romance was). Probably, I continued (confidently, wrong-headedly), historical romance doesn't account for more than 30 or 35% of genre's readership.

Hah! Check out the statistics, courtesy of Romance Writers of America's web page. Historical romance (which includes Regencies) accounts for only 16% of the market! (And note that if you count in at least half of the romantic suspense, women's fiction, and inspirationals published, there are probably three romance novels with present-day settings on the shelves for every historical.)

But present-day just doesn't say "romance" to me -- any more than it did for my only slightly more ignorant friend.

Why, I began to wonder. Why, for a certain kind of readerly sensibility, is romance a matter of somewhere that's not quite here, sometime that's not quite now?

A while back, in one of our hoyden discussions, I remember Mary saying that she read for escape. Perhaps, I thought, we're trying to create a hermetic, believable place of refuge (which, for a history hoyden, would be as free of anachronism as you can make it) for when life just gets too tough.

But upon reflection I want to put it differently. There's always anachronism. I don't just mean inevitable errors of detail (hey, my husband found one in War and Peace). The essential, inevitable anachronism -- a feature, not a bug, as the computer programmers say -- is the simple fact of history itself: it's impossible to write or to read about there and then except from the point of view of here and now.

We know we're living in the present because we don't know how it's going to turn out. Iran, Afghanistan, the Dow. Sarah Palin. Global warming. Who knows, who can know? In the present, the rules are always changing, the ground shifting under our feet. It's bracing, crazy-making, and not at all romantic to be alive and adult in this ticking time-bomb of a real world we call home.

Whereas in the worlds of historical fiction (and in other genres as well -- sometimes, I'd suggest, in the most dystopic sci fi) we know where we stand because we know where we're going. Reading our way through the early chapters of a genre novel, we're offered a simultaneous double pleasure: first of recapitulating the early thrill of learning language, gaining mastery over codes and the manners, clothes and tchotkes; and second, of return to and recognition of what we already know.

Critics of the romance genre like to diss it for the inevitability of its happy ending; in response, Julia Quinn rightly points out that in a mystery, no one expects Hercule Poiret not to solve it.

But there's more to it, I think, because in historical romance not only do we know who's going to marry whom, but what's going to happen to Brummell and Byron, Prinny and Napoleon. Equipped with past-and-present parallax vision, the historical romance reader can even see that the heroines (or at least the heroines' daughters' daughters) are eventually going to achieve fuller humanity; we can enjoy all that pretty, protected, muslin-and-corsets second-class citizenship with good conscience, secure in the knowledge that that the witty, sparkly, rebellious moments are actually going to add up to something.

The historical romance doesn't just plop a romance plot into history. It romanticizes history itself, by giving it the beginning, middle, and end we can never get from the rough strife of living our lives.

Some people damn it as costume fiction. Indeed, having gotten my fiction-writing start in fetishistic BDSM erotica, for years I did think was mostly about the props and costumes. And according to one of the most stimulating critical studies I've read in a while -- Historical Romance: Heterosexuality and Performativity, by Lisa Fletcher -- I was partly right; and moreover, the elements of masquerade, role confusion, and crossdressing that I've always been so fond of are pretty important and central to the genre as well.

I should confess that I read this book because I'd heard that Fletcher uses my Almost a Gentleman as one of the examples in her chapter on cross-dressing in popular romance fiction. But what I learned goes far beyond a vindication of my obsessions and intuitions. I'll be mulling over it well into the future, but in right now I've only got space for one zinger of an idea that I want to share. With great gratitude to Lisa Fletcher, for citing this observation by Umberto Eco, the critic and author of The Name of the Rose, who suggests that we think of:

...a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, "I love you madly," because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly." At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence.

Oh yes. That's how it for me anyway. I may be a stranger in a strange land, but I'm no false innocent. And I suspect that (in our present Silver Age of the Smart, Romance-reading Bitch) few of us are. That we're all learning to say I love you in the present tense by knowing that we've been this way before, by the great circle route of the recreated romantic past.

Definitely more to come, especially on those gnarly notions of heterosexuality and performativity.

But now I'd love to hear from anybody with whom this strikes a responsive chord. Or any innocents out there, false or perhaps not.

Heartfelt thanks to romance scholar Dr. Eric Selinger, of Depaul University and the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (note to romance geeks: join IASPR!) for turning me on to this terrific critical study.

"Let Them Eat Cake" ... Marie Antoinette maligned

2009-07-08T01:34:00.000-07:00

I've been doing a fair bit of research on Marie Antoinette lately, a woman who, despite her foibles, friviolities, and frailties, was made the scapegoat of an era, always despised as an outsider (which was in fact the point of most arranged royal marriages), and derided by even her husband's eldest maiden aunt as L'Autrichienne (a mean-spirited pun on "the Austrian" as well as the French word for "bitch," chienne.)

Sure, she was a horrific spendthrift, but so was everyone else at court; and as Queen of France, not only was she expected to set the tone in fashion, but she was supposed to support the kingdom's various factories. "Buy local" was her mandate and so her extravagant purchases of Lyons silks, Alençon lace, and Sèvres porcelain--all of which were emulated by the nobility--was a way of keeping her subjects employed.

Scorn and derision were heaped upon Marie Antoinette's elaborately coiffed head even during her lifetime. It was often repeated that when bread was so scare that there was rioting in the streets, she callously remarked, "If they have no bread, then let them eat cake."

It made the broadsheets, and even the history books, but she never said it. In fact, the origin of the phrase remains in doubt. Although historian Antonia Fraser cites no attribution for her conjecture, she believes the phrase was uttered by another French queen, and another foreigner to boot, the Spanish born wife of Louis XIV, Marie-Thérèse, who was said to have remarked that if the peasants had no bread then let them eat the crust (croûte) of the paté. She she never used the word "cake" either (which is gâteau in French).

In book six of his autobiography, The Confessions, the noted philosopher, novelist, and radical, Jean-Jacques Rousseau referred to the infamous quote, also without attribution. He wrote:

"Enfin je me rappelai le pis-aller d’une grande princesse à qui l’on disait que les paysans n’avaient pas de pain, et qui répondit : Qu’ils mangent de la brioche. J’achetai de la brioche. ", which translates to: "Finally I recalled the worst-recourse of a great princess to whom one said that the peasants had no bread, and who responded: "Let them eat brioche"... [a savory roll often eaten at breakfast; the recipe is full of eggs and butter, and very rich-tasting.]

Although The Confessions was not published until 1782, the book were completed in 1769 when Marie Antoinette was merely a prepubescent Archduchess of Austria. She did not arrive in France until the spring of 1770 when she was all of fourteen years old, a roses-and-cream child whose only desire was to please her adopted family and kingdom. So Rousseau could not possibly have been fingering Marie Antoinette when he referred to "une grande princess."

Marie Antoinette in 1769 when she was 13 or 14 years old; the same year Rousseau finished his Confessions

Marie Antoinette was such a soft touch that she alone of the French royal family refused to trash the peasants' cornfields by riding through them during the hunt. True, in her nearly twenty years of marriage (before her incarceration in the Tuileries after the mob stormed Versailles in July, 1789), she should have ventured out among her people beyond the outskirts of Versailles and the environs of Paris. But she was more aware of the lives of the laborers than one gives her credit for; and, to quote a fairly recent US president, she did feel their pain.

So, even though we're a bunch of history geeks and sticklers on this blog, how do you feel about playing fast and loose with such a well known remark? Let's assume that Marie Antoinette never said "let them eat cake" (or any permutation of that phrase). Would you attribute the quote to her anyway, for the sake of fiction?

And ... have you ever let the facts not get in the way of a good story, so to speak? When?

Castles Defined

2009-07-06T07:27:00.000-07:00

Quickly, without putting on your scholar's cap, what does the word CASTLE call to mind? My first image is the Disney Castle but then I was raised on Walt Disney every Sunday night. When I asked my niece what words she would use to describe the way a castle made her feel she said: safe (and beautiful but that is a another subject entirely)

Not bad for a ten-year-old. Sir Charles Oman in his book "Castles" defines it as “a fortified dwelling intended for purposes of residence and defense.” It takes four pages of fascinating reading to prove his phrase.

Timber and Earth castles were the simplest castles to bear the name. They were not much more than a raised earth mound and a small house-like structure surrounded by a wooden palisade. Usually made of oak, they could withstand attacks but were built for security and not to impress. I'd love to write a story where the bride is told she will live in a castle and arrives to find "timber and earth" and not one iota of elegance.

Scholars used to think that timber and earth castles preceded stone castles Now it is thought that both were built at the same time, the determining factor being how quickly the castle was needed and what materials were available (source: "Castles of Britain and Ireland" by Plantagenet Fry).

Dating from 1066 to1200 timber and earth castles or their stone counterparts were built for the purpose of controlling newly claimed property and the people who lived on it. There were two types of castles according to Oman: royal and baronial.

The king had a series of castles built to protect his interest. To intimidate the populace, to defend from an external enemy and those built to protect critical rivers, roads and passes. Oman estimates that before 1100 William had some thirty royal castles.

Baronial castles were spots chosen by the new Norman landholders as the best place to site their building, both for defense and convenience of travel. Not being the most trusting king in the world, William rarely bestowed a whole region on a single man. If a knight had more than one castle they were nowhere near each other, each castle protecting a separate holding. The exceptions were in the great frontier areas such as Shrewsbury.

Uusally, castles were built near population centers. There are hardly any castles dating from the Norman conquest in “the long stretch in the wooded weald of Kent and Sussex between the line of castles north of it and those near the sea.” (Osman) The same is true of the moors, fens and bare downs.

One of those classed as ‘near the sea’ by Osman is one of my all time favorite castles pictured at the right – Bodiam Castle. It was built in one complete operation in the 1380’s significantly after the Norman Conquest. It is ironic that the license permitted the knight to build the castle because of the real threat of French invasion. In his book, Fry gives a wonderful description of the interior of Bodiam, clearly built for comfort and defense.

Bodiam’s defenses were not “severely” tested until it was threatened with bombardment during the Civil War – the owner promptly surrendered.

In my book LOVER'S KISS, the art department inadvertently designed the prefect castle for the Pennistan family. When I saw the cover I knew that this was the place the Pennistans had called home for hundreds of years. The rounded part is the original building, built for defense, complete with a partial moat. After the Civil War the square section was added for comfort.

One last thought: palaces were built for lavish comfort and not for defense. The words castle and palace are not interchangeable even though some castles grew into very comfortable houses.

What comes to mind when you think of a castle? Do you have a favorite?

(This is an updated version of a subject originally discussed on January 13, 2007)

Infidelity - the dark side of romance?

2009-07-01T00:00:00.000-07:00

It’s at the heart of the conflict in Casablanca, Tristan & Isolde, The English Patient, Anna Karenina, Notorious, Brief Encounter, The Painted Veil, and countless classic love stories. And yet for many readers, it’s a deal-breaker, particularly when it comes to genre romance.

As a reader and a writer, I don’t dislike infidelity or adultery plots per say. Infidelity is an uncomfortable subject but uncomfortable subjects can make for good drama. It can definitely be a challenge to give a story a happy ending after someone’s been unfaithful. Of all of the stories I mentioned at the start of the post, only Notorious has a conventional happily-ever-after ending. The others have unhappy or bittersweet endings. If the marriage survives the infidelity, you need to believe that the couple can get past it, that it won’t happen again, that the betrayed partner won’t constantly blame the unfaithful partner (which is pretty mucht he conversation Steve and Miranda have with their marriage counselor in the recent Sex & the City movie). If the unfaithful lovers end up together, one can find oneself sympathizing with the betrayed spouse. Notorious pulls it off by making the spouse a villain, albeit a complex one who genuinely loves his wife. Although when I posted about this topic on my own website recently, Lesley pointed out that "In classic fiction, it seems that adultery by a woman is punishable by death (Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary), but from the C20th this is less often the case (Lady Chatterley for instance)." but from the C20th this is less often the case (Lady Chatterley for instance)."

Of course the terms of the marriage and the expectations go into it affect the level of betrayal. In my historical romance, Rightfully His, there’s a subplot between the heroine’s sister and her husband who have a society marriage in which both have lovers and they get along quite amiably. However, in the course of the book, they realize that they love each other and the terms of their marriage change.

Lesley brought up the Poldark novels (the tv series based on them), in the course of which both Ross and Demelza are unfaithful and yet ultimately they get past the betrayals. "In the Poldark novels, the repercussions of both Ross and Demelza’s infidelities echo for many years, continuing to put strain on what is otherwise a strong and loving marriage. With a long series covering many years, there is plenty of scope for a writer to work through the issues raised." Stephanie added, "While I don’t think two wrongs make a right, I couldn’t help feeling a glimmer of satisfaction that Ross finally got to experience a bit of what his wife had endured for years, during his obsession with Elizabeth." I have to say, I felt much the same.

Both the hero and heroine in Pam's wonderful The Slightest Provocation have been unfaithful when the story begins with them married but estranged. It gives them a lot of past baggage to work through but it also means they start with the scales, in a sense, balanced.

Lesley also mentioned Dorothy Dunnett's House of Niccolò series: "I know many readers couldn’t forgive Gelis in the House of Niccolo books, and felt that the reasons given for her behaviour weren’t sufficient to justify her actions." Some of the most spirited Dunnett discussions I've been involved in concern readers differing views of Gelis. Personally, I had issues with the House of Niccolò in the end (while at the start, I liked it better than the Lymond Chronicles) but not because of Gelis. I could understand why she did what she did, and I could believe she and Nicholas got past it. (Though ultimately, when everyone’s motivations were revealed, it all got a bit murky.)

I write about betrayal a lot, so when I write about infidelity, I like to explore how it compares and contrasts to other types of betrayal. In Secrets of a Lady Mélanie has undeniably betrayed Charles in a number of ways, but I deliberately left it ambiguous as to whether or not she committed adultery. I actually was explicit about it in an earlier draft of the book, then decided I wasn’t sure myself so I left it open to question. I figured out the answer for myself a bit later, and at some point, when appropriate, I’ll work it into a subsequent book.

They do confront the issue of infidelity and their different expectations going into marriage, in a scene in the as yet unpublished The Mask of Night:

You didn’t intend to be faithful when you married me.”

She regarded him with that scouring honesty with which she confronted uncomfortable questions. “No, I didn’t. But then I’d never hold my own behavior up as a model of anything.” She smoothed a crease from her skirt. “Did you? Intend to be faithful?”

“Yes, as it happens. But it was hardly as though I had a very active career to abandon.”

“And you take your promises seriously.” In the warm wash of candlelight, Mélanie’s gaze had the bruised look he remembered from last night. “Fidelity hasn’t been a word in my vocabulary for a long time. It might have been once. When I was a girl playing Juliet in my father’s theatre company. Before—”

“Everything else.” Before she’d been raped by a gang of British soldiers, seen her father and sister killed, been left penniless and homeless.

“Being raped was the least of it,” she said, in the low, rough voice he’d learned to recognize from moments when she dredged up long-buried truths. “I could have got past that, I think. It was losing everyone I cared about, fighting for survival. I had to claw my way back to a sense of purpose. When I did, so much I’d used to value didn’t make sense anymore.”

“There’s more than one kind of fidelity, Mel. You’ve been remarkably faithful to a number of things.”

Her gaze fastened on his face. “Charles, you know that I—“

He looked into the scarred, beautiful eyes from which he’d never been able to hide things. He found he didn’t want a declaration based on duty or guilt. “I know you,” he said.

How do you feel about infidelity in books? Is it a deal-breaker? If not, what you think makes it work in some stories? Does it make a difference whether it’s the hero or the heroine who is unfaithful? What the terms of the marriage are? Whether it’s a story about a couple overcoming one or both partners’ infidelity or the story of a pair of unfaithful lovers? Oh, and if you've read Secrets, do you think Mélanie was unfaithful to Charles after they married? Why or why not?

Petticoats

2009-06-29T07:56:00.000-07:00

I’m going to do a simple post today on the topic of petticoats. In my books (set in the 18th century), petticoats is the generic term for all the layers of a woman’s skirts, the outer as well as the under. By the Regency, a petticoat has come to mean a specific undergarment; a layer that goes over the stays but under the gown. It serves a couple different purposes: It adds to the opacity of the ensemble (many gowns being basically see-though) and it can add warmth (esp if it’s made out of something like a lightweight knit wool).

The examples I’ve seen tend to either close in the back with Dorset thread buttons or with drawstring ties (one for the neckline and one for the waist), or they button under the arm (which was also common for habits and walking dresses which were comprised of a skirt [with a small bodice to hold it up] and a spencer/jacket).

The first image is a petticoat c. 1800 with whitework around the hem.

The second is another c. 1820. You can see that the waist has moved down and the bottom has multiple layers of cording to stiffen it and help hold out the skirts.

Anyone have any questions about petticoats or any other specific bit of underwear?

A mansion in McCloud

2009-06-26T11:15:00.000-07:00

I just returned from a delicious week spent in McCloud, California. This tiny village sits just south of Mt. Shasta, which you can see from every street in town. McCloud is my favorite place to rest and recoup, partly because my brother and his wife live there, partly because I have no agenda or to-do list when I visit, and partly because their house has a huge, old-fashioned sunny/shady front porch.

This house was built in 1904! McCloud is an old lumber-mill town in Siskiyou County, 14 miles east of Highway 5. Between 1904 and 1908, the mill owners built all the houses in town for the lumbermen and their families, and the structures are still solid as a just-skinned redwood tree. Most are two-story, with big rambling kitchens, many-paned windows, big front porches, fenced gardens, steep roofs (for the snow), and wood shingles.

When my brother and his wife first looked at the house, it was divided into two separate upstairs and downstairs apartments (nowdays you’d call it a duplex). When they bought it in 2004 it was a real mess. They converted it into a (very large) single-family house, stripped the hardwood floor, added 3 elegant bathrooms (!), modernized the kitchen, scraped off the wallpaper and painted all the walls (including the beautiful old crown molding). Then they furnished the entire place with antiques scrounged from estate sales in nearby Dunsmuir and Shasta City.

If you love big, old houses, you would love this place: four bedrooms with wrought iron double-bedstead frames and handmade heirloom quilts; 4 bathrooms, 3 with old-fashioned claw-foot tubs; oriental rugs bought at estate sales on the downstairs living room floor and on the upstairs living room floor; and a wall-to-wall windowed sun-porch upstairs that runs the width of the house.

And, of course, my favorite feature---the sublimely relaxing front porch, on which I hang out and work on my novel in progress.
And read.
And nibble cheese and wine.
And talk.
And write...
And wish I could spend year-round in McCloud.

I adore old houses. Do you?

All About Alais

2009-06-23T21:34:00.000-07:00

People celebrate Father’s Day in their own special ways. This year, my family popped A Lion in Winter into the DVD player. As heartwarming family dramas go, it is right up there with King Lear. No one’s eyes get put out, but there’s plenty of paternal howling on the heath, filial betrayal, and general familial disillusionment. There is not a single son of Henry II who doesn’t betray him. Everyone gets disowned at least once. Stuff to warm the cockles of one’s heart. I’m just waiting it for the Plantagenet Guide to Parenting. One could shelve it right next to the Titus Andronicus Cookbook.

What I wanted to know was, what happened to Alais? For those who don’t know the story, A Lion in Winter is a (heavily fictionalized) account of the latter days of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, as their sons play parent off against parent in an attempt to snag the crown—while Eleanor and Henry play son off against son in an attempt to score points off each other in a long-standing love match turned grudge match. In the midst of it all is the sister of the French king, long ago betrothed to Richard, then Count of Poitou, sent as a child of nine to be raised in the English court, now mistress to Henry II, passed around as a pawn from prince to prince.

In the movie, Alais is the last joy of an aging king, the May in a May and December romance. Was the poor Princess Alais Henry II’s mistress? Contemporary chroniclers certainly seemed to think so. Giraldus Cambrensis claimed that Henry had plans to annul his marriage to Eleanor, disinherit his sons, marry Alais, and breed a new line of heirs to his empire. Whether those were his ultimate plans or not, the rumor that he had taken her to his bed echoed through two kingdoms. Alais was alternately promised to both Richard and John and in the end wed to neither. Not all that unlike the movie, minus the little matter of love.

So what happened to Alais after those final credits rolled? Throughout the reign of Richard, Alais was held in close confinement, first in Rouen, then in Caen. Brought to the English court at nine, she was thirty-three by the time she was finally released, traded back to her brother Philip as one bargaining chip among many in a treaty during the incessant wars between England and France. Although she was, by the standards of the day, not only used goods but well past her marital sell-by date, Philip found another matrimonial alliance for her: he married Alais off to Guillaume de Ponthieu, whose lands provided a buffer on the French frontier against those held by Richard on one side and the Count of Flanders on the other. She bore Guillaume three children, dying in childbed with the last at the age of forty.

Unlike the woman in whose shadow she spent her youth, the redoubtable Eleanor of Aquitaine, Alais seems to have had little say in her own destiny. But one can't help wondering what it must have been like to have been at the front-lines of the Plantagenet squabbles, with all those larger-than-life characters charging about.

Someone really ought to write a book about her…. Are there any overlooked historical characters who you think deserve their own novel time?

Word Of Mouth

2009-06-22T05:55:00.000-07:00

The novel THE HELP by Kathryn Stockett is on my “What I Have Read” list. A good friend told me that I had to read it. I bought a copy and was so engrossed in the story that I did not even resent the two hour departure delay on a recent flight.

While finally waiting in line to board a fellow passenger asked me if the book was good, that everyone at a dinner party had said it was a must-read. While I was waiting for the next event at the family wedding (which is why we sat in DC waiting out a thunder storm in Milwaukee) another guest commented on how engrossed I was in my book. When she saw the title she said, “Oh my deacon at church recommended it.”

Don’t we, as writers and readers, love word-of-mouth? Not Oprah-size promotion or even the “what our booksellers are reading” post-its at the bookstore. But the honest-to-God type where the title and the story are on everyone’s heart and mind and lips.

I have seen this happen with rousing success a few times in my career as reader and writer. With Waller’s BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY and more recently in the romance community with Joanna Bourne’s THE SPYMASTER’S LADY.

Who knows why it happens? I welcome all opinions. Here is my theory: that these books strike a chord with readers, that the characters are so real and so endearing that it is hard to let them go so we pass them on.

There is something else on my mind in regards to THE HELP and its distant relative THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES. The idea of a public statement that “I wish I had done better,” the writing as a way to say “I wish this is what I had done.” The writer is admitting, in these two cases as regards the way blacks were treated in the south in the 60’s, that “I understand not what was happening them and this book is making it up to you the best way I can.”

They are not writing revisionist history, which was my first thought, but a heartfelt wish that they had been able to see more clearly. I know this because I am part of that world. I amreminded of the women who shaped my young life in Washington DC when it was still very much a southern town. (That's me at about age eight)

My grandmothers’ maids Sally and Ellen and our own maid, Alice, who walked me to kindergarten and listened to me chatter endlessly the whole way. Alice who walked me home from kindergarten and was there when I cried because a boy said that my drawing was the only ugly one. Alice said just the right thing (That boy liked you best of all and he say it by being mean. That’s what boys do before they’re too old to know about kissing’.) Alice and Sally and Ellen were a significant part of my life and I do not even know their last names.

So like Kathryn Stockett and Sue Monk Kidd I am taking a moment to acknowledge them and say that I wish I had understood more of what their lives were like.

What word-of-mouth books do you remember best? And what recent reading experience brought your world into clearer focus?

I am posting this from the Milwaukee airport as we head back to DC and will respond when I am home later this evening.

Seduced but Not Abandoned: Sarah Waters and Other Notes from the House of Genre

2009-06-19T09:00:00.000-07:00

Can you remember how a favorite book seduced you?

There are lots of ways, of course, but I prefer public and shameless -- in the aisles of a bookstore when you can't bear to stop reading. You pay for the thing as you finish page two or three or four; you hold your place with your finger as you flee to the coffee house down the block.

Anyway, that's how I found myself in thrall, perhaps a decade ago, to Sarah Waters' first smart, sexy historical novel, Tipping the Velvet, from its very first page, my reader self helpless not to follow a disembodied narrative voice into a late 19th century oyster-parlor, in Whitstable, Kent, in a...

... narrow, weather-boarded house, painted a flaking blue, half-way between the High Street and the harbor...

... through the front door to the dim, low-ceilinged, fragrant room... the bill of fare chalked on a board -- the spirit lamps, the sweating slabs of butter...

... thence to take a peek where the kitchen door [...swings] to and fro...

... to see the lady frowning into the clouds of steam that rose from a pan...

... and next to her a slender, white-faced unremarkable-looking girl...

The girl as unremarkable and also as real as myself, from the moment Tipping the Velvet's heroine Nancy Astley claims her voice, from the center of the house where she grew up.

I won't deny it was the voice that got me first, but its siren call to read my way through rooms and doors and halls is one of my happiest memories of a book having its way with me.

Because fictional houses can be seductive. When Lizzy Bennet teases her sister Jane by saying she must date her love for Darcy from first "seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley," we smile but we also note the truth that glimmers through the mockery. Because we know that Lizzy has learned a lot about the house's owner from the house itself.

In popular romance fiction, we know that a great house that spans generations can function as...

-- an element of a hero or heroine's personality

-- a set of constraints on privacy or expression

-- an ensemble of tradition, responsibility, and sense of self

-- a fantasyland of escapist luxury

-- a precious hoard of knowledge from the fascinating past.

I found all of the above and more, in earlier Hoyden posts where writers confided their fascination with the historic houses they love to visit, research, and understand. And I also found (in one of my own posts) some remarks about great houses as an indispensable element in a sister fictional genre, the detective story -- at least in its venerable Country House variant.

But the house as primary fictional element is even more important in another member of the family of popular genres. I mean of course the horror story, ghost story, or gothic, where the weight of the past can be oppressive enough to threaten the house's owners or inhabitants.

Difficult, though, to put an airtight chronology to these family inheritances on the tree of genres. Jane Austen distilled the elements of modern romance novel from gothic pastiche in her early Northanger Abbey. But this shouldn't lead us to forget that the romantic adventure novel (a pair of lovers separated by abductions, pirates, wars) is the world's oldest prose fiction, dating back to second century AD Greece. (Nor to ignore the other sibling genre -- the bratty little brother sci fi, which the critic Northrop Frye calls the inheritor of the romantic tradition, perhaps because of all those space operas with their starships like little Greek boats on the Mediterranean, buffeted about in quest of home).

In any case, the house is primary in Waters' latest astonishing novel, The Little Stranger, a ghost story I read with mounting terror and anxiety, admiration and pleasure. Once again, beginning on the first page, when a narrative voice informs us (less lyrically this time) that I first saw Hundreds Hall when I was ten years old.

We don't know much about this narrator -- it must have been a boy, we think, though he's not one now. The first time he saw the house must have been a while ago -- he says it was on an Empire Day fete; even an ignorant American reader like myself must think that Britain doesn't celebrate such a thing anymore. And yes, he was a boy, for he stood with a line of other village children making a boy-scout salute while Mrs Ayres and the Colonel went past us...

He doesn't remember much about the swell people who inhabited Hundreds Hall so much as the house. Especially the inside of it -- for although there'd been lavatories set up for the village celebrants in the stable, when he needed to use it, his mother, who still had friends among the servants (still? had she been a servant there herself?) took him quietly into the house, where he gets a taste of the thrill of the house itself, as he peers in from behind the green baize curtain that traditionally separates owner from servant.

He's drawn to one of the dustless white walls, which had a decorative plaster order, a representation of acorns and leaves...

He tries to prise out one of the acorns from its setting, and when that failed to release it I got out my penknife and dug away with that...

I wasn't a spiteful or destructive boy. It was simply that, in admiring the house, I wanted to possess a piece of it.... I was like a man, I suppose, wanting a lock of hair from the head of a girl he had suddenly and blindingly become enamoured of.

After which original moment of trespass, transgression, of violence and desire, this reader was once again helplessly seduced -- again by an entry into a house, a story, even (or because) this voice is stodgy instead of lyrical, a rational even if slightly guilty outsider.

No good will come of this, my properly seduced reader self thought.

And no good does, in the body of the novel, which takes place thirty years after this initial assault -- in the late 1940s, after World War II, after the Ayres family has borne the death of one child, the serious war wounds of another, and a national economy badly damaged as well. Those surviving can barely support the money-suck the house has become; while as for the boy with the penknife, son of a former servant, he's now a village doctor, struggling to build a practice.

But that's all I'm going to tell you of the plot. Though I wish I could think of a more genteel way to tell you that The Little Stranger scared the crap out of me even as I enjoyed and admired it.

And to recommend it to you as a historical novel as well, even if it isn't one of Waters's hot, colorful, highly romantic 19th century "Lesbo romps" (her own term for the critically acclaimed Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith -- the British literary establishment seems to me less prissy than the American, having short-listed the compulsively readable Lesbo romp Fingersmith for the prestigious Booker prize).

Somber, in contrast, as its narrative voice is (and perhaps disappointing some fans, by not having an intrepid lesbian heroine busily reclaiming a century of British fiction) The Little Stranger nonetheless does some excellent literary reclamation of its own (a particularly scary scene takes place amid a failed courtship, in a grand Regency-styled saloon, built by an ancestor described as right out of Georgette Heyer -- well, it got my attention, anyway). But that's just one of the creaks and echoes in this historical house, and one of the hints at the secrets of class violence at the heart of the ghost story genre in its brilliant retelling.

Any other Sarah Waters fans out there? Some favorite ghost stories? (Click on the links to read more about Waters and her favorites).

And I always love to hear tales of readerly ravishment, by books that wouldn't let you put them down.

A marriage made in Hanover or in Hell? George I and Sophia Dorothea of Celle

2009-06-17T01:01:00.000-07:00

George William, Duke of Brunswick Lüneburg

You know there’s trouble ahead when the in-laws hate each other long before the betrothal even takes place.

Eleanore Desmier d'Olbreuse

Sophia Dorothea of Celle was a love child, the daughter of George William, the Duke of Brunswick Lüneburg, who ruled the postage-stamp-sized Celle portion of the duchy, and his mistress Eleanore Desmier d’Olbreuse, an exiled French Protestant aristocrat.

George William had been all set to inherit the far more prestigious duchy of Hanover, but it came with strings attached: he had to marry the mannish-looking bluestocking his father had selected for him, Princess Sophia, daughter of the Palatine King of Bohemia.

Here's Sophia as a young woman, in 1644. She certainly doesn't look "mannish" to me! Then again, her sister painted the portrait. I'm guessing she didn't age well.

Evidently Sophia was so repugnant to George William that he ceded part of his inheritance, offering his Hanoverian claim to his younger brother, Ernst Augustus, if he would take the homely Sophia off his hands. The ambitious Ernst Augustus agreed, as long as George William promised never to marry and sire heirs, because they would end up rivaling their own first cousins for the Hanoverian throne.

Ernst Augustus, George's father

There was only one major problem with this fraternal bride swap: Sophia had been in love with George William and didn’t much appreciate his foisting her on his kid brother.

Seven years later, in 1665, George William fell head over heels for the dark bouncing curls, enchanting smile, and sparkling eyes of Eleanore d’Olbreuse. He had to have her, but there was that pesky promise to his brother. He got around it by arranging a sort of unofficial morganatic marriage to Eleanore, meaning that she derived no title, nor would their offspring have any claims to their father’s property.

But when Sophia Dorothea was born out of formal wedlock in 1666, Eleanore worried about the difficulties of securing a husband for a bastard daughter and began campaigning for the girl’s legitimization and for a proper marriage to George William. The process took years. By 1676, because Ernst Augustus and Duchess Sophia already had plenty of sons as potential successors to the duchy of Hanover, they no longer perceived the daughter of George William and Eleanore as a threat. Their original objections to the marriage mooted, little Sophia Dorothea was legitimatized, and her parents were legally wed.

Sophia Dorothea grew up to resemble Snow White, with thick dark hair, doelike eyes, an ivory complexion, and tiny hands and feet. With her stunning figure, she was grace personified. Flirtatious and vivacious, she excelled in all the womanly arts and talents of music, dance, singing, and needlework. To most suitors for her hand, her birthright mattered little. Besides, she had been declared retroactively legitimate.

Although Duchess Sophia despised her sister-in-law Eleanore, she recognized that the best way to get control of Celle was to keep it in the family. So she saddled up her horse and rode over to visit her in-laws, proposing that they wed Sophia Dorothea to her eldest son, George Ludwig, six years the girl’s senior.

George Ludwig (1660-1727), later Elector of Hanover and George I of England

George Ludwig had already distinguished himself as a soldier. His two talents revolved around killing things, as his greatest extracurricular passion was hunting, if you don’t count his ardor for his invariably hideous mistresses. His union with Sophia Dorothea would certainly not be the love match her parents enjoyed. It was closer to Beauty and the Beast, minus the transformation and the happy ending. Nicknamed “the pig snout,” George Ludwig lacked looks, culture, intellect, and regal bearing. Where Sophia Dorothea was lively, charming, and musical, George Ludwig was slow and sullen with a chilly disposition that masked a vindictive core.

Even his mother didn’t like him. As she cheerfully looked forward to receiving the annual installments of Sophia Dorothea’s substantial dowry, the Duchess Sophia wrote to one of her other nieces:

One hundred thousand thalers a year is a goodly sum to pocket . . . without speaking of a pretty wife, who will find a match in my son George Ludwig, the most pigheaded, stubborn boy who ever lived, and who has round his brains such a thick crust that I defy any man or woman ever to discover what is in them. He does not care much for the match itself, but one hundred thousand thalers a year have tempted him as they would have tempted anybody else.

When young Sophia Dorothea learned she would have to wed her twenty-two-year-old first cousin, she rebelled, declaring “I will not marry the pig snout!” as she hurled his miniature portrait, encrusted with diamonds, across the room. But it was a fait accompli; the Hanovers were waiting downstairs. Sophia Dorothea’s father was adamant about the match and Eleanore was powerless to stop him, even as she anticipated clashes between Sophia Dorothea and the mother-in-law from hell. When the sixteen-year-old sacrificial bride-to-be was escorted down to meet Duchess Sophia and kiss her jeweled hand, she fainted. She had the same reaction a few days later when she was presented to her betrothed.

George Ludwig was just as insulted by the match. In his eyes, his luscious cousin’s looks were nothing compared to her initial bastardy.

Nonetheless, the young couple’s wishes were ignored in favor of dynastic and political goals. So on November 22, 1682, each looking like a prisoner en route to the scaffold, the pale and trembling Sophia Dorothea was wed to the chilly and distant George Ludwig in the chapel of Celle Castle. The bride’s mother sobbed loudly during the entire ceremony. The groom’s mother, having sacrificed her ego to politics, looked grim. Only the fathers were smiling at the thought of the sizeable double duchy that would be created by the uniting of their adjoining realms.

The newlyweds formally resided at the Leine Palace in Hanover. Sophia Dorothea was immediately made miserable not only by her husband’s remoteness but also by her mother-in-law’s perpetual scolding regarding her ignorance of court etiquette. Luckily for Sophia Dorothea, George Ludwig became literally distant when he embarked on various military campaigns for significant stretches of time. But he kept au courant with his wife’s activities through the reports of spies he had placed among her servants, who chronicled everything she did or said, particularly when she turned her wit on him, shredding his personality in public.

Sophia Dorothea of Celle

In between arguments, they did manage to have two children. In 1683, after Sophia Dorothea gave birth to a son and heir, George Augustus, things became more cordial. Sophia Dorothea endeavored to ingratiate herself with her in-laws and George Ludwig promised to swear off adultery. His paramour was Sophia Charlotte von Kielmannsegg, the married daughter of his father’s mistress, the blowsy Countess Platen. Although the countess had numerous lovers, it was widely assumed by all but the related parties that the woman Platen had placed in the prince’s bed was her daughter by Duke Ernst Augustus, making the happy couple half siblings.

In 1685, Sophia Dorothea took off on an Italian holiday with her father-in-law. While she was away, George found a new lover among his mother’s maids of honor—Ehrengard Melusine von der Schulenberg—as freakishly tall and anorexically thin as Frau von Kielmannsegg was short and portly.

When the princess returned from her vacation to find that her husband had taken up with a second hideous mistress, she was livid; but the royal couple must have kissed and made up just long enough for Sophia Dorothea to become pregnant again. Their daughter—also named Sophia Dorothea—was born on March 16, 1687. But during the particularly acrimonious celebration of the little girl’s birth, after George nearly strangled his wife in public, the battling Hanovers wanted nothing more to do with each other.

Sophia was indeed far from the perfect wife. As heedless and selfish as she was lovely, in 1689 she commenced a torrid epistolary affair with a tall, handsome, and rakish Swedish mercenary in her father-in-law’s army. By the time he fell shako over spurs for the princess, Count Philipp Christoph von Königsmark had left his curly black wig and shiny boots on the floor of many a European lady’s boudoir. Sophisticated and cultured, and as flirtatious as his inamorata, he enjoyed literature and dancing and all the refined and elegant trappings of polite and elegant society. His previous paramours even included the scheming and jealous Countess Platen, Ernst August’s mistress. However, his liaison with the Hanoverian hereditary princess, his soul mate and fellow sensualist, was True Love, and by 1690 he had dropped the countess like a contaminated object and become Sophia Dorothea’s paramour in every way. Their romance was filled with clandestine trysts, coded correspondence, secret signals, and a trusted confidante to act as a go-between.

Philipp Christoph von Königsmark

The couple spent as much time in each other’s arms as possible and exchanged lurid love letters. The count wrote to his beloved, “I embrace your knees” and expressed a longing to “kiss that little place which has given me so much pleasure.” But around 1692 the latter letter, and many others, found its way into the hands of Sophia Dorothea’s father-in-law, most probably through the machinations of the spurned Countess Platen.

Countess Platen convinced Ernst Augustus to exile the count, but no sooner was he banished than the handsome Swedish mercenary got himself a new post with the Elector of Saxony. However, at an officers’ party one night in Dresden, von Königsmark became a bit too voluble under the influence and dished the dirt on the Hanoverian royal family. Naturally, the trash talking got back to his former employer.

The one most injured by von Königsmark’s mockery around the punch bowl was the tall and skeletal Ehrengard Melusine von der Schulenberg. She ran to her lover, tearfully complaining that his wife’s banished paramour had mortally insulted her. George Ludwig confronted Sophia Dorothea, who promptly let him have it, insisting that the real sex scandal was his affair with Melusine! A pitched battle ensued between the royal spouses and George Ludwig tried to choke his wife to death. Shoving her to the floor, he vowed never to see her again. Unlike his earlier promise to quit committing adultery, this pledge he kept.

With nothing left of her marriage, Sophia Dorothea and von Königsmark scheduled an elopement. Arriving at the Leine Palace, von Königsmark made straight for his lover’s boudoir; after enjoying a passionate reunion, the count planned to come back for her the following day.
But Countess Platen discovered the plan and reported it to Ernst Augustus, who had his guards waylay von Königsmark as he left Sophia Dorothea’s bedroom. The stories about the count’s subsequent murder are as colorful as they are varied. What is certain is that he was ambushed—either on the open road or in the Leine Palace—and that he fought back valiantly, wounding one of his assailants. The count was slain; his body disappeared entirely. Most historians believe it was buried right under the bloodstained floorboards of the corridor where he may have been summarily dispatched, his corpse covered in quicklime to eradicate the stench of decay and hasten decomposition. Meanwhile, a hysterical Sophia Dorothea was detained in her rooms, under house arrest.

George Ludwig had ignored his wife’s infidelity for years because von Königsmark was such a crack soldier and one of the best swordsmen in Europe. But enough was enough. A kangaroo court found Sophia Dorothea guilty of “malicious desertion”—a far greater crime than adultery, since desertion would create problems with the collection of her annual dowry installments. And on December 28, 1694, her marriage to George Ludwig was legally dissolved—a relief to the princess, who was now officially rid of a husband she found revolting. “We still adhere to our oft-repeated resolution never to cohabit matrimonially with our husband, and that we desire nothing so much as that separation of marriage requested by our husband may take place,” she had averred during the divorce proceedings.

All traces of Sophia Dorothea’s existence in Hanover were expunged, although her former in-laws happily continued to pocket her annual dowry installments. On February 28, 1695, Sophia Dorothea was “banished” to a lovely moated country home in Ahlden, where, after the first, exceptionally restrictive year of her incarceration, she lived out the rest of her days in what most of us would consider luxury, attended by a modest retinue. She was given the new title duchess, or princess, of Ahlden. Although her children were taken away and raised by their paternal grandmother, Sophia Dorothea would not have been the recipient of any mother-of-the-year trophies, so this sacrifice was probably for the best.

Meanwhile, George Ludwig continued to enjoy the charms of his two lovers. By then, Melusine—acknowledged since 1691 as his maîtresse en titre—gave him two daughters, who were immediately reborn as the prince’s “nieces.” She would bear a third daughter in 1701.
George Ludwig became the Elector of Hanover on the death of his father in 1698. He promptly dismissed Countess Platen from court. On her deathbed she confessed to her complicity in the murder of Count Philipp Christoph von Königsmark, and the details of his brutal, bloody demise came to light, exonerating George Ludwig, who in any case had always been assumed to have been ignorant of the plot. Nonetheless, his wife’s adulterous affair and the strange case of von Königsmark’s disappearance, as well as Sophia Dorothea’s subsequent imprisonment, had been the talk of European courts for years.

Yet even as she remained under lock and key, Sophia Dorothea’s existence remained a problem. George Ludwig was actively campaigning to be placed on the short list for succession to the English throne. According to the 1701 Act of Succession, all future rulers of England had to be Protestants descended from the Stuart line. George Ludwig’s accession was a long shot at the time because Queen Anne, who ascended the throne in 1702, seemed exceptionally fertile. Anne ultimately endured seventeen pregnancies but none of her children survived into adulthood. George Ludwig’s mother, the Dowager Electress Sophia, was a granddaughter of the Stuart king James I, and a Protestant to boot, so her claim—as well as George Ludwig’s if his mother predeceased him—were genuine.

However, his divorce from Sophia Dorothea was both a political and a religious embarrassment, especially in England. She could very well manage to attack George Ludwig’s character, adding fuel to the cause of the Jacobites, who wanted to see the Catholic descendants of James II and his second wife, Mary of Modena, on the British throne.

But on April 12, 1714, the House of Lords resolved that a request be sent to Queen Anne to issue a proclamation offering a reward to anyone who apprehended and brought to justice the Jacobite “Pretender” James Francis Edward Stuart, the son of James II and Mary of Modena. Anne signed the proclamation on June 21, paving the way for a Protestant successor—which meant that George Ludwig, Elector of Hanover, was next in line for the throne; his mother had died just weeks earlier, on June 8.

Less than two months after the issuance of the proclamation, on August 1, 1714, Queen Anne died.

If Sophia Dorothea had remained married to George Ludwig, she would have been Queen of England. Some historians believe that her divorce papers might not have been ironclad; this would explain why, after George Ludwig’s accession as George I of England, she was watched even more closely for fear that she might escape Ahlden and demand to share his throne. Their daughter, Sophia Dorothea the younger, had become Queen of Prussia, but her own husband was such a tyrant that he forbade her to help her mother in any way.

On November 13, 1726, lonely and all but forgotten, Sophia Dorothea died at the age of sixty; some historians cite the cause of death as a stroke or heart attack, while others claim she suffered a fever. She had been a prisoner for thirty-one years.

Evidently, as she lay dying in agony, Sophia Dorothea scrawled a letter to her ex-husband, cursing him from the grave. On her death the court of Hanover went into mourning, but George sent word from London that no one was to wear black. Sophia Dorothea had inherited her mother’s property in 1722 upon Eleanore’s death and willed it to her children, but George destroyed the will and appropriated her property for himself. Then he ordered all her personal effects at Ahlden to be burned. He insisted on her ignominious burial at Ahlden, but the ground was too waterlogged, so her coffin sat around in a dreary chamber for two months until his superstitious mistress Melusine claimed to see Sophia Dorothea’s unfettered spirit flying about in the guise of a bird.

In May 1727, Sophia Dorothea was finally interred within the family crypt in the Old Church at Celle, where visitors honoring her martyrdom to true love still place flowers on her unprepossessing lead coffin.

That June, the sixty-seven-year-old monarch embarked on his fifth excursion to Hanover since the beginning of his reign as King of England. On June 20, his little entourage stopped en route in Delden, Holland, at the home of a friend, Count de Twillet, where George enjoyed an enormous supper, overindulging in a dessert of oranges and strawberries. Despite a dreadful bellyache the following day, the king was eager to get back on the road. When he reached Ibbenburen, he suffered an attack of apoplexy.

He managed to reach his birthplace of Osnabrück, dying there in the early hours of the morning on June 22, 1727, and was buried near his mother’s monument at the Leineschloss Church in Hanover.

Some believe the catalyst for George’s sudden fatal illness was not a surfeit of fruit but an incident that occurred on June 19, 1727, when he received a mail delivery as he traveled to Hanover. It was his wife’s ghostly epistle. George suddenly remembered that decades earlier a fortune-teller had prophesied that if he were in any way responsible for his wife’s death he would die within a year of her demise.

George and Sophia Dorothea’s son succeeded his father on the British throne, ruling as George II. He ordered Hanover’s records unsealed and discovered 1,399 pages of love letters—only a fraction of those exchanged—between his mother and Count von Königsmark. His idyll was shattered: his mother was no saint and had indeed been an adulteress. But George also recognized that his father had behaved dreadfully to her. Had Sophia Dorothea lived, George II would have liberated her from Ahlden and installed her as the Dowager Queen of England.
In any event, the lesson was not fully learned. George II took mistresses as well, although for a while he did his best to be discreet about it—which, in his view at least, was his way of respecting the feelings of his purportedly beloved wife, Caroline of Anspach.

What marriages made in hell (royal or otherwise) have sparked your imagination? What are some of your favorites, and why?

The Democratization of Fashion

2009-06-15T06:57:00.001-07:00

Yes that’s a pretentious title, for a post that is uneducated speculation. I borrowed the phrase from the book COSTUME by Rachel Kemper. For her fashion became available to the general populace (aka the masses) with the introduction of mail order catalogs.

I don’t agree with her. I think fashionable styles for everyone began with the invention of the sewing machine and even before that with the use of machine produced cloth. Elias Howe patented his machine that used “thread from two sources” in a lockstitch design. That was in 1846, though there had been attempts at developing a sewing machine as early as 1755. (As an aside the patent wars surrounding the sewing machine are worth a blog if you’re interested in patent law (I’m not).)

Today Vera Wang, of the uber expensive wedding dresses, has designed a line of clothes for Kohl’s, just one of a number of designers to make stylish cloths and an affordable price.

Shopping is my great escape (note: shopping, not buying). One of my favorite things to do is check out the designer salons at Saks and Neimans and then follow the styles down the economic scale to Kohls and Target. The brilliant monologue on how color makes it way to the masses by Meryl Streep in THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA is one of the best illustrations of the “democratization of fashion."

Wearing clothes with a sense of style transcends economic status as the blogger TheSartorialist.blogspot.com illustrates. But in order to do that the clothes have to be available. The sewing machine made that possible as did the mail order catalog.

After the printing press I think that sewing machine was one of the great social equalizers of all time.

Your thoughts?

Henry the VIII's Love Letters to Anne Boleyn

2009-06-12T08:51:00.000-07:00

I love reading historical letters and Janet's post on Jane Austen's letters reminded me...this spring, the love letters of Henry the VIII to Anne Boleyn were made public. After decades in storage at the Vatican, the letters, most certainly stolen from Queen Anne, are on view as part of a major exhibition on Henry VIII opening at the British Library on April 23.

Written around 1528, five years before Anne became Queen, the words of devotion show a softer side to Henry, very different from the man who had a public reputation as a bloodthirsty ruler.

In some of the letters he assures her that "henceforth my heart will be dedicated to you alone," and apologizes profusely for ever suggesting she could be a mere mistress.

In many of the letters he professes a deeply passionate and committed love---and his intention to marry her (he was still married to Catherine of Aragon at the time).

He promises this repeatedly to Anne:

"The demonstrations of your affection are such, and the beautiful words of your letters are so cordially phrased, that they really oblige me to honour, love, and serve you forever....”

"For my part, I will outdo you, if this be possible, rather than reciprocate, in loyalty of heart and my desire to please you."

"Beseeching you also that if I have in any way offended you, you will give me the same absolution for which you ask, assuring you that henceforth my heart will be dedicated to you alone, and wishing greatly that my body was so too."

Anne was aware of Henry’s womanizing reputation and most scholars agree that she held out on him for at least seven years---refusing to have sexual relations with him.

Then I read the letter below, and I can’t quite tell—but maybe by this time Anne had given a little (all?) of it up? Their relationship was most certainly physical to some degree, since “dukkys” translates to “breasts” in modern English.

“Mine own sweetheart, these shall be to advertise you of the great loneliness that I find here since your departing, for I ensure you methinketh the time longer since your departing now last than I was wont to do a whole fortnight: I think your kindness and my fervents of love causeth it, for otherwise I would not have thought it possible that for so little a while it should have grieved me, but now that I am coming toward you methinketh my pains been half released.... Wishing myself (specially an evening) in my sweetheart's arms, whose pretty dukkys I trust shortly to kiss. Written with the hand of him that was, is, and shall be yours by his will.
H.R.”

Henry's desire for Anne was one of the driving forces behind England's breaking away from the rule of Roman Catholic Church. It became the Henry’s goal to secure an annulment from his wife, Catherine of Aragon, so he would be free to marry Anne. When I read his letters (written during this time), I find them passionate and tender, and yet a little disturbing. Perhaps because I know how this all ends. Just eight years after most of these letters were written, Henry was ready to move on, still in search of a woman who could give him a son (Anne did not and had fallen out of favor). Based on false charges of adultery, incest and witchcraft, he had her beheaded at the Tower of London in 1536.

The letters show Henry did really love Anne passionately in the beginning---but he had to arrest and execute friends, fight with his family, face unpopularity, banish his wife and child, and have a crisis of faith, to wed and bed her.

So I can’t help reading these now and coming away feeling like there was a hint of something sinister (obsession?) in his writings from the very beginning. What about you? Anne may have been blinded by her own ambition but is there something in these letters that sends up a red flag and would have alerted you to the danger?

A Day in the Life

2009-06-11T00:06:00.000-07:00

How I wish someone would publish an annotated edition of Jane Austen's letters which I'm reading, or dipping into, as part of my research for my (tentatively titled) Immortal Jane books.

I wouldn't go so far as to agree with the description of the letters as "a desert of trivialities punctuated by occasional oases of clever malice" (H.W. Garrod) but they can be hard going. I've picked a letter Jane wrote to her sister Cassandra 210 years ago, on Tuesday, June 11, 1799, and will share with you what I found.

Jane was probably finishing Susan (renamed Northanger Abbey) around this time. There's a reference in this letter to First Impressions, revised almost a decade later to become Pride & Prejudice. Jane, Mrs. Austen and Edward Austen/Knight had arrived in Bath on May 17, and were staying at 13, Queens Square. They returned home at the end of June.

Much of the letter is to do with fashion. Jane had certain shopping errands she had to fulfill in the big city, including finding trimmings for Cassandra's hat:

Though you have given me unlimited powers concerning Your Sprig, I cannot determine what to do about it, & shall therefore in this & every future letter continue to ask you for further directions.--We have been to the cheap Shop, & very cheap we found it, but there are only flowers made there, no fruit--& as I could get 4 or 5 very pretty sprigs of the former for the same money which would procure only one Orleans plumb, in short could get more for three or four Shillings than I could have means of bringing home, I cannot decide on the fruit till I hear from you again.--Besides, I cannot help thinking that it is more natural to have flowers grow out of the head than fruit.--What do you think on that subject?

Sure enough, the Lady's Magazine of May 1799 pronounced: No woman, truly loyal to the divinity of fashion, can possibly appear now without feathers and flowers.

No mention of fruit, however, which Cassandra seemed to have her heart set on, and the Orleans plum[b] was a fairly ordinary dark-red English-grown fruit, nothing particularly exotic. To me, that begs the question of why you'd want it on a hat in the first place.

Jane mentions in the letter that they have not been out anywhere public, but in her previous letter of June 2 she mentioned that they were planning several outings, including attending

a Concert with Illuminations and fireworks;--to the latter Eliz. & I look forward with pleasure, & even the Concert will have more than its' usual charm with me, as the Gardens are large enough for me to get pretty well beyond the reach of its sound.

This was Jane Austen the music lover? Or should we assume that the musicianship at Sydney Gardens was of a particularly low standard? This outing was to have taken place on June 4, George III's birthday, but rain required the event to be postponed until June 18. It had been a particularly unpleasant spring and early summer in England that year, cold and rainy. The oboist in the orchestra, which Jane was so avid not to hear, was Alexander Herschel[l], brother of astronomer and composer William Herschel.

I'll blog another time about Sydney Gardens, a fashionable pleasure garden at the end of Great Pulteney Street, complete with a moated castle ruin, bowling green, labyrinth, and many other delights.

Here's another quote from today's letter which strikes a particular chord with me:

I do not know what the matter is with me today but I cannot write quietly; I am always wandering away into some exclamation or other.

I think I've probably answered my own question of why no one has annotated Austen's letters, or, more likely, demonstrated my incompetence at an attempt. Have you read Austen's letters? Whose letters from the period would you recommend? And do you agree with Austen that it's more natural to have flowers than fruit growing from one's head?

Le Faye, Deirdre. Jane Austen: A Family Record. Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Le Faye, Deirdre (ed.). Jane Austen's Letters. Oxford University Press, 1997.
Snaddon, Brenda. The Last Promenade: Sydney Gardens, Bath. Millstream Books, 2000.

And now, in a blatant burst of self-promotion:
New website and contest at janetmullany.com and a chance to win a signed copy of A Most Lamentable Comedy in Pam Rosenthal's latest contest.
Plus today I'm blogging over at Risky Regencies about John Constable, whose birthday it is today, and talking about Immortal Jane at Austenprose and Jane Austen Today.

Marriage in Trouble Plots

2009-06-10T00:00:00.000-07:00

I recently returned to reading Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil, which I had started last summer and then put aside (I sometimes hit moments when I’m writing when I just can’t read anything). I was drawn back immediately by the richness of the writing and the sharp emotional details. I was also struck by comparing and contrasting the book with the recent film, which I also liked. The major events are the same, but the emotional arc is quite different (though Kitty Fane does grow and change in both). It’s rather as though someone were to film Secrets of a Lady with the same basic plot but have the story end with Charles and Mel realizing they’d never really known or loved each other but staying together for practicality.

The other the thing The Painted Veil got me to thinking about is one of my favorite literary tropes–marriage in trouble plots. They’ve always fascinated me, long before I started writing about the marital angst of Charles and Mélanie Fraser. That’s why, when I cite influences and inspirations for the Charles & Mélanie series, in addition to the more obvious ones like The Scarlet Pimpernel, Scaramouche, Dorothy Dunnett, and Dorothy Sayers, I mention Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, and Len Deighton’s Bernard Samson books.

Reading The Painted Veil, I pondered the fascination of this plotline. The intimacy of marriage ups the stakes in the conflict between two people. Percy’s devastation at Marguerite’s seeming lack of trustworthiness is all the greater because she has just become his wife. Betrayal, I think, is one of the worst things that can happen to a person. How much worse is it when that betrayal comes from a spouse? Years of living together also gives characters a knowledge of each other that recent lovers wouldn’t have. In The Real Thing, the hero has a wonderful speech about knowing one’s spouse, in a way that goes far beyond carnal. That knowledge can be used for good or ill. George and Martha know just how to push each other’s buttons. So, for that matter, do Maggie and Brick.

Particularly in an historical setting, marriage makes it difficult for two people to walk away from each other, no matter how poisoned their relationship has grown. When I blogged about this topic on my own website, JMM commented that I admit, I like marriage in trouble plots more in historical settings. The stakes are higher because divorce was harder or impossible. There’s a fascinating tension in two people pretending to be a couple to the outside world, while being estranged when they’re alone. Think of Percy and Marguerite keeping up appearances to the beau monde yet unable to communicate in private, Maggie and Brick maintaining the charade of their marriage (or at least Maggie trying to) in front of his family. Kitty and Walter Fane sharing a bungalow in a cholera-infested town, seen by most as a devoted couple who’ve risked infection so as not to be separated.

On my website, Stephanie commented that I tend to think of “marriage in trouble” plots as falling into two categories:

1) The marriage begins in unpropitious circumstances–a forced alliance, a shotgun wedding–and the couple has to try to make it work.
2) The marriage starts out solid, even loving, and then has to weather a serious crisis.

Kitty and Walter in The Painted Veil fit the first example. The know each other very little (hence much of the tragedy). Ross and Demelza's relationship, in Winston Graham's wonderful Poldark series, begins as the first example and then morphs into the second as they fall in love but also face various crises in their marriage. Dorothy Sayers's Busman's Honeymoon shows the very much in love Peter and Harriet weathering the first crisis in their marriage as they adjust to being a couple. (As Mélanie thinks in Beneath a Silent Moon, "Marriage was a shocking invasion of privacy.")

Lesley brought up a third variation and cited our own Pam: Another variation on the theme is Pam Rosenthal’s ‘The Slightest Provocation’, where they married young, there was bad behaviour on both sides, and a long separation, but with maturity they realise that what draws them together is more important than past mistakes.

RfP added What I love about TSP is exactly what you mentioned–the way Kit and Mary know how to push each other’s buttons. Combined with the flashbacks, Rosenthal convinces me the button-pushing is a sign of intimacy and of something worth salvaging, not a sign of toxicity.

One of the many things I love about The Slightest Provocation is the way the flashbacks are interwoven, so the reader learns about Kit and Mary’s marriage as they reflect back on it. A rich portrait of their marriage emerges.

Taryn wrote that she likes marriage in trouble books because there are so many secrets, hidden hurts, and long history to unwrap and sort through. With any married couple, there’s a past to explore–how they came to be married and why, what they both expected from the marriage, how that expectation compares to the current reality. And history is something I love to explore as a writer, whether it’s historical events or the personal history shared by two people.

Do you like marriage in trouble stories? Why or why not? Any favorite examples to suggest? What do you think makes them work? Writers, what are the particular challenges of writing this type of story? If you've written this type of book, do you find yourself spending more time than usual making notes on the characters' history?

Accuracy or Intelligibility?

2009-06-09T07:40:00.000-07:00

Recently there has been a lively discussion about this topic on a loop for historical writers. It was kicked off by one writer’s horror upon discovering that “foyer” (OED: The entrance hall of a hotel, restaurant, theatre, etc. 1915 ‘BARTIMEUS’ Tall Ship iv. 77 There were at least half a dozen mothers in the foyer of the big..hotel.) was not a period word for the Regency setting of her novel. The proper term historically is “hall” (OED: The entrance-room or vestibule of a house; hence, the lobby or entrance passage. 1663 GERBIER Counsel 10 The Hall of a private-house, serving for the most part but for a Passage.), which led many to realize with growing horror that “hall” (in the way we use it: a corridor in a building which allows access to multiple rooms) is also not period. (OED: orig. U.S, An entrance-hall or passage leading to various rooms in a house or building. 1877 J. HABBERTON Jericho Road 173 It passed through the narrow hallway which separated the cell from the jailor's apartments.)

It’s one thing to avoid words that encompass ideas that are themselves anachronistic for our setting, such as mesmerized (OED: To subject a person to the influence of mesmerism; to lead or direct by mesmerism; to hypnotize. 1829 R. CHENEVIX in London Med. & Physical Jrnl. 6 222, I mesmerised the patient through the door.), sadistic (OED: Of, relating to, or characterized by sadism; cruel. 1892 C. G. CHADDOCK tr. R. von Krafft-Ebing Psychopathia Sexualis iii. 79 The perverse sadistic impulse, to injure women and put contempt and humiliation upon them.) or surreal (OED: Having the qualities of surrealist art; bizarre, dreamlike. 1937 Burlington Mag. Jan. p. xiv/1 Some ‘surreal’ influence haunts the regions of the Black Forest.). It’s harder to know what the best choice is when faced with using the modern term for something mundane (such as “hall”). If accuracy is the ultimate goal, then another word should be used “passage” (OED: A corridor giving access to the various rooms or divisions of a building, ship, etc., or running between two rooms; a gallery, lobby, or hall. a1525 Bk. Sevyne Sagis 2344, in W. A. Craigie Asloan MS (1925) II. 75 Ane preve passage for to mak.), corridor (OED: A main passage in a large building, upon which in its course many apartments open. Also fig. Cf. COULISSE 4. 1814 BYRON Corsair III. xix, Glimmering through the dusky corridore, Another [lamp] chequers o'er the shadow'd floor), but IMO, accuracy must be balanced with intelligibility. Somehow, as a woman of the 21st century, “passage” or “passageway” simply don’t make me picture a “hallway”. Passageways lead to oubliettes and smugglers’ dens and secret rooms.

I know. I know. I over think these things, but what do you think should rule the day: accuracy or intelligibility?

Rumi: "That which frees you from your tiny self"

2009-06-07T07:49:00.000-07:00

The Persians love poetry so much that one 10th century poet, Rabia Balkhi, wrote his last poem in his own blood. The Persian Sufi poetic tradition spans 1,000 years and is part of a living tradition within the larger tradition of Persian mysterical poetry. Jalal al-Din Rumi, born in 1207, was one of the first major Persian poets to receive attention in the West. About 80 years ago his poems were translated into accurate, word-for-word Victorian prose (English is closer to Persian than either Arabic or Turkish); later reworkings by poets such as Robert Bly took more creative license.

You are like the sun–
Come!
Without your face, the garden is yellow and pale–
Come!
Without you, the world is like dust–
Come!
Without you, the circle of love turns cold.
Come! ( The Missing Sun)

Rumi was born in Afghanistan, and fled along the Silk Road to Turkey when the Mongols invaded in the 13th century. He wrote in Persian, his native language, and his works include 30,000 verses of impassioned lyric poetry and an additional 20,000 verses contained in his master work, the Mathnawi. This is a tapestry of Aesopian fables, everyday life scenes of his time, revelations from the Koran, and metaphysics in the Sufi tradition. His work is a synthesis of all Islamic culture drawing on Arab traditions through Hellenistic, Christian, Jewish, and Persian cultures.

Rumi was regarded as a “completed” human being who embodies divine attributes.

Reason said, “We live in a world
of six directions – and that’s it!”

Love replied, “There is a path beyond,
and I have traveled it many times.”

Reason saw a market and set up shop,
but love trades in another currency altogether.
(Trading in Love's Currency)

Some Muslims considered Rumi a second Mohammad, Christians as a second Christ, and Jews as a second Moses. Sufis, the most spiritual of Islamic traditions, are drawn to the mystical and expound a religion based on Love. In Persia, particularly, the metaphor of Love, the Lover, and the Beloved was developed so vividly that metaphoric significance sometimes was mistaken for sensuality.

At breakfast tea a beloved asked her lover,
“Who do you love more, yourself or me?”

“From my head to my foot I have become you.
Nothing remains of me but my name.
You have your wish. Only you exist.
I’ve disappeared like a drop of vinegar
in an ocean of honey.” (The Ruby)

For the Sufi, love is the cause of existence, “the hand behind the puppets.” Recognition of the Beloved (or Friend) in human form is a recognition of spiritual gifts Allah bestows on His creatures. Friendship and love are essential values, the celebration of “hereness.”

In love’s circle there’s another kind of serenity;
in love’s wine, another kind of hangover,
What you learned in school is one thing–
love is something entirely different. (Something Different)

In poetry, very little is what it appears to be. Sufi poets, especially, inhabits many worlds simultaneously, “worlds within worlds.” Their favorite themes are spiritual separation and solitude; the experience of connectness and unity; and passion and immediacy--in other words, “that which frees you from your tiny self.”

Don’t go away, come near.
Don’t be faithless, be faithful.
Find the antidote in the venom.
Come to the root of the root of yourself.
(The Root of the Root of Your Self)

Sufi works were sung or recited with music at Sufi gatherings as an outward expression of a spiritual meditation. Poems are often written in quatrains (4-line poems) with extensive symbolism. Wine = divine love; drunkenness = ecstasy of direct knowledge of God; a tavern = a Sufi gathering place; a tavern-goer = lower class, poverty, humility; rogues or profligates = Sufi dervishes. The language of love = the longing for divine nearness. When you lose yourself, you will reach the Beloved (God).

Heart came on solid footing with breath refined
to warn the best of communities.
Heart placed your head
like a pen on the page of love.

We are joyous pennants in your just wind.
Master, to where do you dance? (Love Is a Stranger)

Sources: The Essential Rumi (tr. by Coleman Barks); Love Is a Stranger (tr. by Kabir Helminski); Love’s Alchemy, Poems from the Sufi Tradition (tr. by David and Sabrineh Fideler)

Judging Books By Their Covers

2009-06-03T16:16:00.000-07:00

This past Monday, at Lady Jane’s Salon, Laurel McKee’s editor gave a presentation on the process by which her cover reached its final form. As publishing guru Ron Hogan played Vanna White with the pictures, we got to see the gradual development from concept to final version. Some of the changes were sparked by practical concerns, such as there being too many curlicues on the cover font for easy reading across a crowded bookstore.

The other major change, however, came about when the author pointed out that the initial color of the heroine’s dress—for lack of a better term, slut red—would have been entirely inappropriate for a lady of that period and especially a lady in morning. The dress went to purple.

I was very impressed. I don’t like to think of myself as a cynic, but my general take on covers is somewhat akin to my feelings about “historical” movies: fact is honored more in the breach than the observance and you just expect that and deal with it so long as the final result is pretty.

This has been a pretty good maxim for most of my covers so far, all of which have been gorgeous (I love the Dutton art department), but most of which have featured paintings from, well, let’s just call them neighboring time periods. My first cover was spot on in that it featured a painting of a dark-haired woman with a bunch of carnations (how they found that, I’ll never know). It was less spot on in terms of the clothing. The book is set in 1803. The painting and the dress are later nineteenth century, although they look, at a quick glance, very eighteenth century.

The most obviously anachronistic of the lot was my third book, The Deception of the Emerald Ring. The girl in the painting actually looks very much as I imagined my heroine. And it’s certainly very, very green, which was the idea. But the dress is very clearly Victorian rather than Empire. I got a few snarky emails over that one.

I’ve noticed the same phenomenon with other authors’ books as well. Karen Harper’s Mistress Shakespeare, about the secret first wife of the immortal late sixteenth/early seventeenth century bard, features the exact same picture I had in poster form over my desk freshman year: My Sweet Rose, by nineteenth century Preraphaelite painter, John William Waterhouse.

Readers, does it bother you when the cover art on historical fiction reflects the wrong time period? Authors, would you rather have a pretty cover or a historically correct one? (Well, clearly both, but if you had to pick one....) Have you ever objected to a cover on historical grounds?

A British Treasure

2009-05-31T13:35:00.000-07:00

In the spring of 1986 I absorbed a museum exhibit that ranks as the best in my experience. "The Treasure Houses of Britain" was seen by almost one million people during its five months at Washington's National Gallery of Art. Like most of the visitors I was amazed, impressed, "gobsmacked" not only by the sheer opulence of the treasures but also by their artistic merit.

Whenever I haul out the 600page/7 pound catalog I lose myself for hours and today alone I came up with tree subjects for future blog posts.

Here are a few notes about the Treasure Houses exhibit. According to the National Gallery of Art website more than 700 objects were gathered from more than 200 homes in Great Britain representing collecting and domestic arts from the 15th to the 20th century. Gervase Jackson-Stops chose the art work and the exhibit was structured to showcase each period of collecting. Seventeen period rooms were built to display the objects. "The Treasure Houses of Britain" was obviously the most ambitious project ever undertaken by the NGA.

It was at this exhibit that I first saw the work of master woodcarver Grinling Gibbons. The piece on display was a a carving of fish and game, not my favorite subject matter, but the delicacy and detail amazed me. I do not know how Gibbons worked but plan to research that more. I do know that he created these masterpieces before dental implements and dremel tools made intricate carving more accessible. Gibbons work shows an attention to detail that defies the imagination of my contemporary “hurry up and get it done” approach to most projects.

Grinling Gibbons was born in Rotterdam in 1648. It’s possible his father was an Englishman who worked with British architect, Inigo Jones. Grinling obviously developed his talent in the nineteen years before he came to England in 1667 but his career as a craftsmen in wood began in earnest when he was discovered by diarist John Evelyn working “in a poor and solitary thatched hut in Kent." Evelyn introduced him to King Charles II through the intercession of Christopher Wren.

Gibbons work can be found in dozens of houses and public buildings throughout Britain, including Petworth, Blenheim, Kirtlington Park and also at Windsor, colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, and many of Wren’s London churches. Gibbons and his workshop added immense detail and beauty to St Paul’s, London. One of the choir stalls is pictured above.

Gibbons worked in other mediums, but wood best suited the detailed handiwork for which he is best remembered. The life-like cravat pictured at the left is on exhibit at Chatsworth and is a departure from his usual work with objects of nature. The panel on the right (from Trinity College at Oxford) is one of my favorites, the grapes look real enough to eat.

Are you familiar with Grinling Gibbons and his work? What exhibit ranks as the “BEST” in your experience?

Promissory Notes: Reading Theory on Vacation

2009-05-29T00:01:00.000-07:00

Amanda's not the only hoyden who's been on the road lately. I recently returned home to San Francisco after a fantastic three weeks doing my Northeast Family Corridor Circuit (New Haven-New York-Philadelphia) for many hugs, visits, and bigtime celebrations, including my sister's wedding (more soon at my own blog) and my son's PhD conferral from Columbia (next year the Corridor gets longer, when Jesse begins teaching English at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore; I'm delighted that the cheap and comfortable Bolt Bus goes there too).

Unusually for me, I didn't make a lot of plans, except to get to the celebrations on time. With more people to visit than I had time for, and my husband, sadly, only able to get off work for the wedding and the degree ceremony (the last long weekend of the trip) I decided to take the solo part of it slow, to follow my nose and my luck: as when my friend Barbara Garson introduced me to an artist friend of hers in the locker room of the Chelsea Piers gym -- who sent me to the glorious Picasso:Mosqueteros show at the Gagosian Gallery on 21st Street (still showing until June 6: run, don't walk, if you're in New York) -- after which, strolling down 23rd Street on the way to the subway, I stopped at a movie theater to see what time Star Trek was starting.

In five minutes? Sure, I said, I'll take a ticket, even as I wondered if there'd be a decent seat left (which is no small concern for someone measuring five foot one on a good day). How nice that I wound up in the best seat in the house, a single in the nicely-banked last row of the theater.

Because it was that kind of a trip. The best, the luckiest kind, that makes a high-and-low culture vulture like me eager to live long and prosper (not to speak of go all soft and happy inside over the absolutely right and absolutely Obama-era Spock-and-Uhura pairing).

The kind of trip where the next thing to do is obviously also the right thing.

And the next thing to read is the right thing as well -- as I sat in this or that New York cafe, w.i.p. on my laptop; pens and notebook, books and drink on the table; with a lovely, leafy late spring just outside, and myself only mildly, occasionally pricked by the exquisite guilt of being in this most wonderful of cities at the wonderful moment when spring rain stirs dull roots even if I hadn't earned it through suffering through an East Coast winter.

East Coasters may understand the guilt thing (I was born in Brooklyn); Californians probably won't.

But between the pricks and twinges I took the season as a gift, even as I took my reading seriously. I've already listed what I was into during those weeks, in my response to Kathrynn's What-Are-You-Reading Hoyden post, but what made it particularly great was checking in with my awesomely erudite son, who knows oodles about the history of the European novel throughout the nineteenth century.

Like when I asked him what he knew about D.A. Miller's lit crit study The Novel and the Police, that Lisa Fletcher makes sound so interesting, in her lit crit study Historical Romance Fiction?

Jesse went to his bookshelf. "Miller's book is very interesting," he said, "and it's important too." Important enough, it seemed, that he had two copies, and graciously handed me one of them.

So I read The Novel and the Police, and began to think about what Miller has to say about novels and "open secrets," and how that works out in romance novels where the hero and heroine are always the last to know.

And which led me to think more about what Lisa Fletcher has to say about historical romance -- popular and literary -- and more particularly about historical cross-dressing romance, which she says occupies a place of some importance for understanding historical romance as a whole. She even makes a few small observations about my cross-dressing historical romance, Almost a Gentleman (that was interesting to read!) among many other texts on her way to an extensive and thought-provoking discussion of Georgette Heyer's cross-dressing romances.

So I also read These Old Shades, and am queuing up The Masqueraders. And then a reread of Possession (A. S. Byatt, I learn from Fletcher, being an outspoken fan of Heyer and doubtless an instructive one), and then perhaps what sounds like a fascinating study by Alison Light, called Forever England: Femininity, Literature, and Conservatism between the Wars, which I hope will help me understand the Tory aspects of the romance genre (as I've groused about it on this blog from time to time, even as I've indulged my early passion for the great popular/literary English between-the-wars writer Dorothy Sayers, of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries).

While back in San Francisco...

"You're so intellectually hungry these days," my husband told me yesterday, and I suppose I am. Not only because I take a wonky lit-crit interest in literary history and in what (still and always a bit mysteriously to me) is called "theory," but because I can't help but think that at least some of that weighty stuff does have something to do with the lighter-than-air stuff I write, and with whatever instinct or memory or desire caused me (not much of a romance reader, in truth) to become a reluctant yet enthralled romance writer.

Also because I write my own stuff better if once in a while I evoke the old shades and stir up the roots with a little spring rain of research, self-understanding and reminiscence. (Leading me to give thanks for the spadework the romance scholars of IASPR are doing, and to encourage anybody else who's interested in this stuff to join the newborn International Association for the Study of Popular Romance. And to thank Dr. Eric Selinger, one of the organization's blithest guiding spirits, for turning me on to the Fletcher book).

And because I think this stuff -- or at least the best of it -- works.

Which is why (drawing upon hoyden Lauren Willig's endlessly helpful Theory of Productive Procrastination) I hope, in some future post, as a break from my own w.i.p. (yes, there is one, I promise!), to give some account of the critical commentary that most helps and interests me, both as reader of popular and literary fiction, historical and erotic romance writer, theory groupie, and even (swear to god, Jess, I'll never be this embarrassing again) proud parent of the smartest, most erudite literary scholar I know.

WHO Slept Here? I Did! Staying at Places with a Past

2009-05-27T01:00:00.000-07:00

My husband and I just returned from about ten days down South.

In New Orleans we stayed at the Lamothe House on Esplanade Avenue, bordering both the Vieux Carré and the Marigny district. Built in the 1830s for a sugar baron, it was one of the first double-wide (so to speak) mansions in the French Quarter, and was completely renovated in 1860.

What you see in the photo below is the dining room where guests have their complimentary, though disappointing, breakfast, consisting primarily of packets labeled Quaker or Kellogg. But that's not the point of my post.

Lamothe House dining room

The wide planked floors slope; the treads of the winding double staircase buckle under your feet as you mount them; the Victorian-era furniture is scratched, the upholstery tatty, and the underpinnings barely there because thousands of butts have sat there over the last three centuries, counting our own (butts and centuries).

Frankly my dears, it's those bygone butts that fascinate me.

Lamothe House foyer

Who slept here before I did? What was this house like in its heyday? Was the poky room we were first assigned, located in a low, one-story building flanking the courtyard and its opposite number, where the slaves slept? Were the rooms we were switched to a combination of front and rear parlors? Did the sugar mogul himself sleep there?

Room 214, Lamothe House. We slept here.

I love staying in places with a past. And if I'm only there for a few days, it doesn't much matter to me that the upholstery is worn or that the floors slant or that the plumbing is erratic. I'm surely not alone in imagining if these walls could talk...

Here, from the Lamothe House Hotel's web site is the history of the house.

The first Lamothe to own the property was Miss Marie Virginie Lamothe, who purchased two parcels of land fronting on Esplanade Avenue in 1829. She sold the same property to her 33-year-old brother, Jean Lamothe, in 1833.

The house was built circa 1839 as one of the first double townhouses to be built in New Orleans. Jean Lamothe was a wealthy sugar planter of French descent originally from the West Indies. He sought refuge in New Orleans for his family at the turn of the century, after the insurrection in Santo Domingo.

In 1859, the Lamothe family sold the property to Henry Parlange and Paul Rivera, two Parisians. At this time, Rivera contracted builder Louis Folliet (E. G. Gottschalk) to make considerable renovations. Rivera's contract included changing all the shutters and doors, and converting the porte-cochere (carriage entrance) into a main entrance and hallway. This is the reason for the unusual façade opening arrangement.

In 1860, the four hand-carved Corinthian columns were added to the double entrance. Also added were the twin winding stairways with hand-turned mahogany rails that sweep up to the second floor reception area and third floor suites. The house's great cypress floor boards and ceiling timbers were hand-hewn and many of the hand-wrought iron fastenings for doors and windows, as well as most of the original rolled glass window panes, have been preserved.

The double service wings were rebuilt of brick, and the courtyard was paved with flat stones originally imported as ship ballast. The original flagstones remain today.The Rivera contract also specified that the parlors were to be richly decorated to the taste of the owner. This is reflected in the rich interior millwork, moldings, and plasterwork installed by Folliet in 1860.

Interior openings retain the original Greek key arches and door frames surmounted by handsome molded cornices and transoms with sophisticated muntin arrangements.

I could not stop imagining what life was like here in the 1830s as well as in the 1860s, and how it changed over the decades.

In Savannah we rented a condo apartment in the Bird Baldwin House on Liberty Street, at the edge of the historic district. The house was built in 1839 as an inn. During the Civil War it served as quarters for some of General Sherman's troops. As a Yankee myself I admit it felt good to stay in a place that housed Union soldiers. Did they tromp all over the hard pine floors in their muddy boots? What did they discuss in front of the fireplaces? What did they do for recreation? How many other weary travelers stayed in these rooms? Where were they going and where had they been?

Do you enjoy staying in houses with a past? Have you ever done so? Do you tend to seek them out when you book a vacation and do you mind if the venue is a bit down at heel, if it's a trade-off to become part of the house's lore?

Medals and Ribbons

2009-05-25T11:22:00.000-07:00

In the US, the last Monday in May is celebrated as a national holiday, Memorial Day. It is a day of official recognition of men and women who have died in military service to their country. In its early days this holiday was called Decoration Day and was originally instituted after the Civil War to honor soldiers who fought for the Union.

General Order #11 states that “The 30th day of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land. In this observance no form or ceremony is prescribed, but Posts and comrades will, in their own way, arrange such fitting services and testimonials of respect as circumstances may permit.”

Since World War I Memorial Day has been recognized as a day to reflect on the loss of life in any military action or war. Memorial Day is often confused with Veterans Day, November 11th which recognizes all who have served in the Armed Forces. But I don’t know any vet who, when thanked for service on Memorial Day, makes the distinction clear.

Medals are another more personal form of recognition for service. The two US medals that are best known are The Congressional Medal of Honor and The Purple Heart. Both of these medals were instituted by George Washington. In 1782 Washington “directed that whenever any singularly meritorious action is performed” the soldier was authorized to wear the “figure of a heart in purple cloth or silk, edged with narrow lace or binding.”

The Purple Heart was one of the first medals to be made available to the enlisted as well as offices. In fact only three Purple Hearts were issued at that time, all
three to non-commissioned officers. Awarding of the Purple Heart (then called the Badge of Military Merit) fell out of use and was not re-instituted until the 200th anniversary of Washington’s birth when the more familiar medal (at right) was designed and formalized.

Since it reintroduction in 1932 over 800,000 Purple Heart medals have been awarded, From 1932 until World War II, it was given not only for being wounded in action but also for meritorious service. The qualifications for the medal have changed since then and the criteria now focus on injury in action.

George Washington authorized the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1792 after the Revolution but it was not a popular award as many thought that such “decorations” were too royal a concept for the new democracy to accept. The medal came into use during the Civil War and is the highest military decoration awarded to this day.

While we are all familiar with the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Purple Heart there are ten medals that precede the Purple Heart in importance with the Medal of Honor at the top, always at the top.

If you are interested in the medals and the criteria for awarding them this website does a nice job of presenting the details http://www.gruntsmilitary.com/army2.shtml.

The actual medals are worn on formal uniforms in order of importance. Ribbons that represent the owner’s medals are worn on a day-to-day basis.

The last picture shows the ribbon representing the medals of a typical senior officer of the late twentieth century. On meeting him anyone could tell a great deal about his career by “reading the ribbons.” The when and where of each ribbon is almost always a story worth hearing. The two most distinctive on this set are the Bronze Star earned in Vietnam as a Lieutenant and the Meritorious Service Medal which is a one inch representation of an amazing experience known as Hurricane Hugo.

I have always wanted to write about ribbons and medals and it seemed that Memorial Day was the perfect opportunity. I promise to return to Kedleston Hall and the Regency in my next blog post.

How did you celebrate this weekend? We had a grand time with our son and daughter-in-law. I hope you had as much fun as we did.

The 10 Most Important Kisses in History

2009-05-22T09:59:00.001-07:00

I saw this article on CNN yesterday and it was just too good to pass up. So I am posting in its entirety, with my comments at the bottom.

From : www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/wayoflife/05/20/mf.ten.important.kisses/index.html

“Pucker up as we explore 10 smooches that changed religion, art, culture, and history. "

1. The Kiss of Judas: A betrayal or just misunderstood?
Nothing ends a good "bromance" quite like flagrant, murderous betrayal. A long time ago, a wandering preacher named Jesus was doing pretty well for himself -- building up a following and promoting religious teachings -- until one of his buddies sold him out to the authorities. In exchange for 30 pieces of silver, Judas Iscariot kissed Jesus on the cheek and, by doing so, identified him to Roman soldiers. Although Judas double-crossed his best friend for a paltry sum, some scholars argue that Judas is the secret hero of Christianity. The claim is based on a recent translation of The Gospel of Judas, a text written by Jesus' followers a couple hundred years after his death.

In 1978, a farmer discovered the mysterious text in Egypt and sold it to an antiques dealer. Years later, a National Geographic Society team got hold of it. They restored and analyzed the document, and in 2006, they announced that the text painted Judas as a man of valor. According to their interpretation, he was actually Jesus' most trusted friend, because he agreed to fake a betrayal so that Jesus could die a martyr and then be resurrected.

Soon after the National Geographic Society released its findings, other scholars started picking the interpretation apart. Chief among them was April D. DeConick, a Rice University biblical studies professor, who claimed the team made some critical errors, including translating several passages to mean the exact opposite of what they were intended to communicate.
DeConick contends that the Gospel says Judas was a "demon" rather than a "spirit," as interpreted by National Geographic, and that he was set apart "from the holy generation" rather than "for the holy generation." With just a few tweaks in translation, Judas has gone right back to playing the bad guy.

2. The kisses you can share with a Quaker
The Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, is a small Christian sect best known for rejecting all forms of violence, embracing progressive politics, and dedicating themselves to simple, restrained living. They've promoted a more harmonious world by founding causes such as Amnesty International, not to mention lending their name to oatmeal.

So we were surprised to learn that when teenage Quakers get together, their favorite activity is a free-for-all kissing game that often ends in bruising and rug burn. Alternately known as Ratchet Screwdriver, Bloody Winkum, or Wink, the game dates back to the early 1900s.
To play, participants divide themselves into girl/boy pairs with one boy left over to be the "Winker." The pairs sit on the floor, with each boy hugging a girl from behind. When the Winker winks at a girl, she tries to scramble across the room to kiss him, while her male partner does his best to hold her back. Hilarity (and release of pent-up sexual frustration) ensues. But not everyone finds this game so hilarious. In 2002, the Children & Young People's Committee of the Quakers in Britain issued a statement discouraging the game at official functions. And while that may not seem surprising, the reasoning is. The committee frowns upon the game because younger children and adults don't get to play, thus making it ageist. Due to their egalitarian values, Quakers seldom segregate by age at get-togethers, and the committee didn't want the very young or the very old to feel left out.

3. The kiss that proved no means no
Gentlemen, a word: When a lady rejects your advances, you'd do best to listen. Take, for example, the story of Thomas Saverland, an English gentleman who was at a party in 1837 and, as a joke, kissed Miss Caroline Newton by force. In response, she bit off a chunk of his nose.
Saverland took her to court, where the judge found his case more hilarious than harrowing. The judge ruled, "When a man kisses a woman against her will, she is fully entitled to bite off his nose, if she so pleases." A smart-mouthed barrister then added, "and eat it up, if she has a fancy that way."

4. The kiss that said "welcome to America!"
At the turn of the 20th century, immigration processing at Ellis Island was quite an ordeal. Immigrants had to prove they weren't carrying any of a long list of illnesses, mental impairments, or moral defects. If you were sick (and it was curable), then you'd be detained in the hospital until you got better. The whole process could take hours, days, or months. And even then, you could be turned back. Also, ladies traveling alone and anyone with less than $20 in their pockets had to wait for a sponsor or family member to meet them. If no one was there to greet you, you were sent back. Of course, all of this was further complicated by the fact that immigrants couldn't go down to the pay phone and call Aunt Bertha when they landed. Instead, when relatives heard that the right ship had docked, they trucked over to Ellis Island and waited desperately by the Kissing Post -- a giant wooden column just outside the room where the final stages of immigration took place. Ellis Island staffers gave the Kissing Post its name because families and lovers were generally swept up in emotion as they reconnected with their long losts.

Today, the Kissing Post continues to be a symbol of hope and togetherness as the pillar that supports the American Family Immigration History Center. If you're one of the 100 million Americans descended from immigrants who passed through Ellis Island, there's a good chance the History Center there can help you find a picture of the ship that carried your ancestors.

5. The Eskimo kiss: A tale taller than the abominable snowman
Popular wisdom claims that Eskimos rub noses because kissing on the lips would cause their mouths to freeze together. Not only is this completely untrue, but Eskimos don't rub noses at all.
The myth of the Eskimo kiss was created by Hollywood in an early "documentary" called Nanook of the North, which took America by storm in 1922. To film it, director Robert J. Flaherty recorded real Inuits in the Arctic. However, in order to accommodate the huge, awkward cameras of the day, he staged all the scenes and built a three-sided igloo for interior shots. Nanook, the main character, wasn't really named Nanook, and the women playing his wives weren't really his wives.

As for the term "Eskimo kiss," that too was constructed by Flaherty to explain how one of the wives was nuzzling her baby. In actuality, the woman was giving her baby a kunik, an expression of affection in Inuit culture. Typically in kuniks, adults press the sides of their noses against the cheeks of their babies and breathe in their scent. Who kuniks whom differs from culture to culture, but it's never a romantic gesture. Inuits kiss on the lips, just like everyone else.

6. The first guy-on-guy kiss to hit the big screen
Movie experts often credit Sunday Bloody Sunday, a 1971 film about a love triangle among two guys and a girl, with being the first mainstream feature film to depict two gay men kissing. That's true, but it wasn't the first time two guys kissed on screen. Apparently, straight men had been doing it for decades. In 1927, two soldiers kissed tenderly in the silent movie "Wings", which won Best Picture at the first Academy Awards. When the film was released, no one raised an eyebrow about the scene, partially because kissing in the trenches was remarkably common during World War I. According to British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Santanu Das, letters and accounts of the war are peppered with stories of soldiers kissing, embracing, and giving each other pet names like "my Palestine Wife."

Das believes the war succeeded in breaking down the traditional limits on emotional and physical intimacy between men, allowing soldiers to form relationships that went beyond what was permissible at home. While it's surprising to us today, that Wings scene didn't even cause a stir in 1920s America.

7. The kiss that gave artists their 15 minutes
If it weren't for kissing, Andy Warhol might never have become The King of Pop Art. In 1963, Warhol was still a little-known commercial illustrator. But that all changed when he bought a silent-film camera and started shooting his friends and acquaintances kissing in unbroken, four-minute-long shots. The result was a series called Kiss, which took the art world by storm. In fact, New York's Gramercy Arts Theater played a new "kiss" each week. The series helped cement Warhol's place in the artsy underground, and it also launched the careers of several kissers.

8. The prepubescent kiss that changed the law
When first-grader Johnathan Prevette pecked his classmate on the cheek in Lexington, North Carolina, he quickly became a poster boy for everything that was wrong with America in 1996.
After Johnathan's classmate complained to a teacher, the 6-year-old was taken out of class for the day, missing an ice cream party. When the school told Johnathan's parents that he'd violated the sexual harassment rules, a media circus followed. Critics pointed to the Prevette case as a sign that political correctness had gone too far, adding that innocent play didn't deserve such harsh punishments. After all, pundits asked, is a child really capable of sexual harassment?

But while Johnathan was making headlines, another legal battle was raging. A 10-year-old Georgia girl named LaShonda Davis had been repeatedly groped by a bully in her class, to the point where she contemplated suicide. She told several of the teachers at her school, but no one did anything. LaShonda's parents had to call the police -- and sue the school --before the abuse stopped.

Both Johnathan and LaShonda deserved protection under the law, and both cases played a role in molding the current standards. In response to the Johnathan Prevette case, the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights issued new guidelines for identifying sexual harassment by putting the emphasis on common sense and telling schools to take age and maturity into account.
But there was still a big question about whether schools should be accountable for students harassing each other. When LaShonda's case went to the Supreme Court in 1999, their answer was yes, sort of. The Court decided that schools can be blamed, but only if they learn of the abuse and do nothing to stop it.

9. The kiss that could send you to jail
In the city of Guanajuato, Mexico, there's a smooching spot called el Callejón del Beso, or the Alley of the Kiss. According to local legend, the alley was once the final scene of a tragic love affair. A young woman and her lover were meeting there to run away together, but when her father discovered them, he stabbed his daughter in the heart. As she lay dying, her lover kissed her hand for the last time, and the alley got its name. Today, it's said that anyone who kisses there will have seven years of happiness. Thanks to its romantic history, the alley has become a popular tourist attraction, although that's starting to change. On January 20, 2009, the ultra-conservative mayor of Guanajuato authorized a new municipal ordinance cracking down on public displays of affection. If he has his way, lip-locking in the open will carry with it a fine of $100 and up to 36 hours in jail.

10. The most Iconic kiss in history
On August 14, 1945, thousands of men and women embraced one another in New York City's Times Square to celebrate victory over Japan. But two people -- a sailor and a nurse -- locked lips at just the right moment and became larger than life. More than a dozen men and at least three women claim to be the kissers in Alfred Eisenstaedt's photograph. Of the men, our favorite is George Mendonça, a Rhode Island fisherman and World War II navy recruit, who claims he grabbed the strange nurse and kissed her right in front of his girlfriend. In fact, Mendonça says his girlfriend, now his wife, is in the background of the photo.

While the mystery will probably never be solved, Alfred Eisenstaedt has left us with a juicy back story. In his autobiography, the famed photographer writes that he followed around a sailor who moved through the crowd, kissing anything wearing a skirt. When the sailor hit on a nurse whose white dress contrasted nicely with his dark suit, Eisenstaedt snapped the shot. But he failed to get their names.

Coincidentally, another photographer, Victor Jorgensen, took the same shot from a slightly different angle and also forgot to get the subjects' names. Jorgensen's version ran in the next day's New York Times, but as a working military photographer at the time, he didn't own the rights to his work. So while Eisenstaedt received glory and royalty checks for his image, Jorgensen simply got a nice clipping to hang on his fridge.”

So there they are….some of the most memorable kisses in history. If I had to make a list of the best kisses in all the romance books I’ve read, I just couldn’t do it. Too much good material. But I’m a sucker for a good historical kiss. Same for movies and plays… I will always hold the Romeo and Juliet’s first kiss close to my heart.

What about you? What kisses rank amongst your 10 most important in a movie, a romance book…or otherwise?