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Monthly Archives: June 2007

Going Places

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Hi! It’s me today, back to the land of the living. My kids were sick early this week which is why Megan kindly covered for me on Wednesday. Thanks again, Megan!

Anyway I want to continue the travel theme started by Diane and Cara. I’m not going anywhere remotely exotic this summer (a cottage on Lake Erie doesn’t count, does it?) but I do love travel. While the British Isles are my favorite destination, I enjoy stories that take characters to different settings, even if sometimes those setting aren’t places I’d actually want to go for real. (I’m averse to heat stroke and political unrest.)

Mary Jo Putney has written some of my favorite Regency (or thereabouts) stories with unusual settings: SHATTERED RAINBOWS, which includes Peninsular War and Waterloo scenes and ends on a fictional island called Skoal and THE CHINA BRIDE. The interesting thing I noticed about these books is that in each, the timeline of the story is rearranged so the first scene takes place in England. I’ve always wondered if this was done for dramatic purposes or, perhaps, to reassure readers hesitant about exotic settings.

I say this because many times I’ve heard that settings outside the British Isles don’t sell, readers don’t like them as well, etc… I can already hear members of our Risky community protesting!

But MJP isn’t the only one who’s made a success of exotic settings. Loretta Chase’s RITA winning THE SANDALWOOD PRINCESS starts in India. MR IMPOSSIBLE, my favorite so far in the recent series (NOT QUITE A LADY is still in my TBR pile) is set in Egypt.

(Note: this illustration is from a delightful book I found on Project Gutenberg titled “A Museum for Young Gentlemen and Ladies”, 15th edition, published 1799.)

Anyway, it seems to me that the historical market may be opening up to more unusual settings. Amanda’s upcoming story, A NOTORIOUS WOMAN, is set in Renaissance Venice and Janet’s FORBIDDEN SHORES on a fictional island in the West Indies. (Brava to both of you!)

So, Riskies and friends, do you like exotic settings? Any favorites? Any you’d like to “visit” that you haven’t before?

Elena
www.elenagreene.com

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Divine madness

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“In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.”… His sense of her inferiority — of its being a degradation — of the family obstacles which judgment had always opposed to inclination, were dwelt on with a warmth which seemed due to the consequence he was wounding, but was very unlikely to recommend his suit.

Darcy’s proposal to Elizabeth and although Jane Austen did not write romance, either by the standards of her time or ours, it has, I think the essence of what makes a romance work: that falling in love with this particular person is the worst possible thing that could happen. Love destroys and creates chaos; you can’t help yourself; you are powerless and there is no twelve-step group that can possibly help.

I’ve always been fascinated by classical legends that have randy gods taking on nonhuman forms to seduce hapless mortals. Why bother with the disguise?–you’re a god, right? But is the disguise, other than the frisson of assuming another form, part of the divine insanity of love? I couldn’t help it, I was a swan with a brain the size of a walnut … One look at his lovely orange beak, that’s all it took …

My heroes and heroines find that their careful, sensible plans are overturned and their moral code and sense go out the window when they fall in love. Love = trouble, conflict, and after many adventures (a very useful phrase for synopses, by the way), acceptance of love and of each other.

What’s your definition of love in romance? Is it all you need?

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Take A Letter, Maria

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The explosion of email has made many Luddites (hi, Dad!) complain that the art of letter-writing is gone forever. Not so, I say; emails, when written with care, can be just as creative, informative, and loving as the best of snail mail (hi, Dad, again!).

Writing letters was a crucial part of any lady’s day; she couldn’t just pick up the phone and call her girlfriend in London. She had to sit down at her escritoire, locate a sheet of paper and a freshly-sharpened pen, and write. We have letters from the period available to read, and they are as mundane as what the family ate for dinner the night before and as provocative as detailing the pros and cons of various suitors.


Letters are an easy way to tell a story, albeit an overdone one; the bane of Cara‘s existence, Samuel Richardson‘s Clarissa, is written entirely in letters. Current Regency authors frequently use letters to reveal characters’ history without doing the dreaded backstory dump.

And, coincidentally enough (honestly! I started writing this post first!), I’ve just started reading Karen Ranney‘s Till We Meet Again, with a crucial plot point revolving around the identity of the person who wrote some letters. Our own Janet‘s Dedication has that as well.

Do you still write letters? How about creative, interesting and correctly-written emails? Do you like reading letters in books? Which are your favorites?

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Megan
www.meganframpton.com

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Cara’s Trip, and Movie Club Selection!

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A variety of things to talk about today…

First off: Tomorrow, I’m off to London and Nice!

Todd has a conference in Nice, and neither of us has ever been to the Riviera. (Ooh! It sounds so chic! So sophisticated! So terrifying!)

We’ll be there for a bit over a week, and I will hopefully be able to putter about alone even though I know no French at all. (Todd knows some, but he’ll be falling asleep in physics talks.)

And hopefully the chic, sophisticated people will not sneer at me. (Or if they do, they’ll do it in French, so I have no idea what they’re sneering about!)

On the way back from Nice, we’re going to spend a few days in London. Todd will do a little more work there, and then we will see things.

We haven’t yet decided what, though. We’ve never seen Syon House, so we might do that.

We have seen the Wallace Collection several times, but not recently, so that sounds good.

Afternoon tea is always a great temptation…

And then there’s a play on in London right now called “Kean,” which is supposed to be kind of sort of maybe about Edmund Kean, which sounds interesting…

(And, while I’m on the subject of plays, I will admit that we have tickets to see Spamalot… Which has a Regency link, in a way: it stars Simon Russell Beale, who played Charles in the Amanda Root/Ciaran Hinds film of Persuasion!)

And usually when we go to London, we end up walking around St. James’s, and seeing Trafalgar Square, and spending time in the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery… And did I mention tea? 🙂

Let’s see — I haven’t been inside St. Paul’s Cathedral recently, so that’s always a possibility…

Nor have I been to Greenwich in a while. (Lots of great Regency research there, of course!)

I must confess, we tend to buy far more books than we should. This time, I will really honestly try to be restrained, and spend far less time on Charing Cross Road.

Anyway, I will be gone during my next two Tuesday blogs, so I’ll try to leave something entertaining for you all to read!

By the way, in case you hadn’t heard…

Pride and Prejudice‘s Jennifer Ehle won a Tony Award Sunday night, for Tom Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia!

Yay, Lizzy Bennet!

Speaking of Jane Austen movies (aren’t I always?) — the first film of the Jane Austen Movie Club has been decided!

On Tuesday, July 3, our Jane Austen Movie Club will discuss the adaptation of Persuasion starring Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds (and Simon Russell Beale!) from 1995. (Future choices of the club will be made through discussion here, but there wasn’t enough time this time!) So be sure to stop in on July 3 and discuss it!

(For more info on what I’m talking about, see here:
Jane Austen Movie Club )

Now I’m off to pack…

Cara
Cara King, who owns way too many books

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Travel Guides for the Imagination

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Are you planning your summer vacation yet? I may not get much farther than Jellico, Tennessee, for a family reunion or Dallas for the RWA conference, but, thanks to Emily Hendrickson from whom I purchased a fortune of books-literally and figuratively-I have travel guides for the imagination!

My travel destination of choice will always be England, but, alas, not this year. So I’ll content myself with a peek into A Portrait of Georgian London by Fiona St. Aubyn. This book is compiled from The Microcosm of London (1810) and contains illustrations by Augustus Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson. It was also my most expensive book purchase, but worth every penny because I can really see what these sites in London looked like in the early 1800s. A real treat, however, is looking at the illustration of St. Martins in the Field and seeing that it looked much the same as when Amanda and Julie and I sat in the pew for a concert in 2003. Same with Westminster Abbey!

In my 2005 trip to the UK we traveled a bit into the Lake District, but not nearly deep enough to see what Wordsworth described as “the majesty of the mountains.” I’ll have to content myself with a tour through this book, The Illustrated Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes, edited by Peter Bicknell. It is full of prints of paintings by period artists of the beauty of the Lake District, and photographs that show that the beauty remains just as it had been then. And, of course, there are Wordsworth’s descriptions as well.

My friend Melissa James (Her Outback Knight, July 2008) is presently in Switzerland, far from her Australian home, but she is not so different than the “200 years of English travellers” who visited the tiny country. When I read about Maria Edgeworth in my copy of Southwards to Geneva: 200 years of English Travellers by Mavis Coulson, I’ll be thinking of Melissa and pining to see majestic mountains in Switzerland as well.

Do you have any Vacations-of-the-Imagination planned? How about real vacations? Can any of us beat Kalen’s trip to Morocco?
Think of me in Jellico!

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