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Monthly Archives: November 2008

I received an email today from Bertram St James, the exceedingly elegant gentleman who mysteriously traveled from Regency England to our modern world a few years ago, and ever since has been watching way too much television and charging pizza and designer clothes to my credit card.

And, because I have nothing clever to say today, I figured I’d just share part of Bertie’s email…

(I know he won’t mind. He loves attention.)

I have a new question, writes the illustrious beau.

I have been attending more Moving Theatres, you see, as well as looking at the TeleVision Device for many hours every day, trying to decipher the ways of your society.

By the way, one of my favourite programmes was that Election series! How very dramatic!

(Though I fear I missed the finale…did Tiny Frey become Prime Minister?)

Oh, yes, my question.

Why are vampires all so comely?

Why do they dress so well?

Why are they neat and clean and elegant?

And why do they pay attention to their hair?

Or perhaps my true question is: why are all the non-vampires on TeleVision and Movie Pictures so unattractive, so poorly groomed, so slovenly?

I feel that if I can ever solve this conundrum, I will be much closer to actually understanding your Modern world…

In the meantime, I will continue to search for answers…

Answers as to why Dr. House never shaves! (And why, if he never shaves, he never grows a proper beard.)

Answers as to why Peter Petrelli cut off his lovely hair!

And answers as to whether or not that Bond fellow is ugly or handsome. I cannot make up my mind!

What do you think?

There you have it…Bertie the Beau’s latest musings….

And I second his last question: what do you think?

Cara
Cara King, who has more questions than answers herself…

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How many of Amanda’s blogs revolve around fashion? She is our very own fashionista and we depend upon her to keep us up on all the rage from those historical ages.

I thought you might like to see what Amanda looks like when she comes upon a beautiful gown from the past. Here she is, complete with worshipful expression, at the Jane Austen Centre in Bath. The photo is from our 2003 Regency Tour of England.

There’s more!

Amanda and me circa 2000, I think, dressed for the Beau Monde Soiree. This was Amanda’s Titanic costume.

My Regency dress was sewn by my personal modiste, Helen, who made the dress from a pattern created from an actual gown of the early 1800s. I think we could have done a better job of the hat but I love the dress. I just need to lose 20 lbs to wear it again.

Isn’t Amanda’s dress pretty?

Here’s another one. I’m guessing this is 2003.

Again my dress is by Helen, but is made from a Simplicity pattern (we learned our lesson on the real Regency dress!) but made of genuine Regency microfiber (hee hee)

This, I believe, was Amanda’s milkmaid costume and I could just see her alongside Marie Antoinette at the Hameau.

On that Regency tour of England, visiting Bath, we danced with the Jane Austen dancers in the same Assembly rooms where Jane Austen danced. This time Amanda dressed as the perfect Regency young lady.

This past summer at the Beau Monde Soiree, Amanda did not appear. Instead there was this unidentified young dandy. Here he is with, from left to right, Lady Julia (Justiss), Lady Louisa (Cornell), and Princess Keira, lately from India.

See? She is really our Regency fashionista!

Last week Scandalizing the Ton was a Fresh Fiction Featured Pick!
Don’t forget, this coming Sunday my friend Mary Blayney will be visiting. At Wet Noodle Posse we’re blogging about writing challenges.

Anything in particular you’d like me to blog about next week? Just let me know!

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Playing with women’s fantasies is a delightful pastime for Rosenthal, who’s always looking for new ways to burn up the pages and keep your mind focused on characters and plot, not just her wonderfully erotic love scenes….an exhilarating adventure filled with untamed passion, intrigue and wild escapades in and out of bed. FOUR STARS — Kathe Robin, Romantic Times

… supremely sensual, wickedly witty, and one of the… best to date [by an author] noted for exquisitely written, intelligent romances that often hover near the erotic edges of the genre… – Kristin Ramsdell, Library Journal

Today we welcome back to the Riskies Pam Rosenthal, who’s here to talk about her new book, The Edge of Impropriety. Your comment or question enter you into a contest for a signed copy of the book, so ask away.

RR: You call The Edge of Impropriety a novel of eros, esthetics, and empire–why? And what inspired it?

PR: Well, the eros part is easy; I always write about sex and desire. But this time I got interested in the classical roots of these concepts, through a fascinating anthology called Erotikon: Essays of Eros, Ancient and Modern, and especially a poem within it, also called Erotikon, by Susan Mitchell. The poem’s about Cupid and Psyche, about the meeting of the human and the divine, and one of its long, prosy lines says:

…there aren’t enough tenses for all this to happen in, the past and the present fragmenting as they bop off one another…

Which is exactly what I believe: that sex doesn’t happen all in the same tense. There’s anticipation and retrospection; a sharpening, a blurring — even perhaps a blanking — of focus, and who knows in what order? Before, after, and during bop off each other (as Mitchell’s word) as though (in my words) in a hot pinball game.

Which is why I find rendering sex in language such a maddening, fun challenge, not to speak of a turnon — for me and hopefully for my readers.

Though here perhaps I might be frightening the horses. So back to the art and culture of the ancient world, the Greek and Roman empires…

…about which I knew shamefully little when I started, necessitating a lot of reading and thinking (my husband and I both audited some college classics courses). And I also thought a lot about our Regency period, with its neo-Classical styles, fashionable ladies women in their pale muslins and aristocratic gentlemen with their large, imposing classical educations, confident in their shared self-image as heirs to the ancient empires. This was, after all, the period when Lord Elgin pried the marbles off the Parthenon and shipped them home to Britain.

Ancient art in the service of rising empire; sex and power, elegance and erudition. I’d recently seen the Elgin Marbles for the first time, and the image that pulled it all together for me was of a scholarly gentleman and an elegant lady exchanging their first heated glances among all those beautiful blank white marble stares.

And the image remained with me into the book itself: Marina and Jasper meet cute among the marbles, in the British Museum.

RR: Your hero, Jasper Hedges, is one of those classically educated gentlemen you don’t entirely approve of. But your heroine is also pretty brainy.

PR: Yes, well, Marina Wyatt’s a writer of Society novels, called silver-fork novels at the time, these were witty, wordy, awfully popular fantasies of life among the haut ton, packaged for the eager consumption of the rising commercial and industrial middle classes, who couldn’t get into Almack’s except by reading about it. Really, these were the first Regency novels, written during the Regency itself — I find that whole self-reflexive thing, not to speak of the class comedy, quite fascinating.

And in fact, Marina’s life story is a highly romanticized version of the life of Margaret, Countess of Blessington, the lady in the painting on the cover of my previous book, The Slightest Provocation. Margaret was a popular novelist and the widow of an earl. And she also gave literary parties, had a scandalous relationship with a famous young dandy and a nasty, hushed-up, early life in Ireland. But in EDGE I mix up all the details and give her a happy ending (not the young dandy, I should add, though he also appears in the book, highly transformed as well).

RR: Is Jasper also based on a historical figure?

PR: No, not really. I patterned his upper-class prejudices (he initially resists taking money for writing) after Lord Byron; his opposition to the looting of Mediterranean art treasures also after Byron; his extensive Cambridge classical education after, of all people, the Reverend Patrick Bronte (father of Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and Branwell); his intellect after any number of guys I’ve been attracted to, including my own husband; and his love for his niece on my husband’s fantastic fathering skills. While as for his looks (a younger, hotter version of his looks, anyway), I drew inspiration, you might say, from this photo of Daniel Craig from the movie of The Golden Compass, especially the stance, the posture. All-in-all, I think that dreaming up Jasper Hedges might have been the most fun I’ve ever had creating a romantic hero, and I was gratified that one of the reviewers from DearAuthor.com — who gave EDGE an A! — called Jasper her favorite of my heroes. Pretty cool given that he’s 47 and sometimes feels his age. Oh, and he also owes a lot to Risky writer Janet Mullany’s Adam Ashworth in Dedication, so thanks are in order to Janet.

RR: Quite early on in the book Marina and Jasper have an understanding that their relationship will be only sexual, but emotional factors come into play, and so do Jasper’s family problems. Was this a hard sell, to have a hero who is guardian to an adolescent niece and deeply concerned with his family responsibilities?

PR: Not exactly a hard sell — because to be honest, I was already contracted and my editor wanted me to move along, given the glacial pace at which I work. But she also was rightfully and consistently concerned about how I was going to put an early adolescent into a book that had lots of hot sex. And in fact I gave the issue a lot of thought — as does Jasper, who makes it a point of honor never to stay the night with Marina, so he can always have breakfast with Sydney, the niece. Marina’s besotted lover, he observes rather grimly to himself, and Sydney’s quaint, straitlaced guardian might inhabit the same body, but they had very little to say to each other.

And yet part of the reason Marina falls in love with Jasper is because of his devotion to Sydney. But what are the prospects for romance when each lover lives a life divided from itself? Or (as Marina puts it) into neat little compartments….Like those trays of insects and bits of bone and mineral in the British Museum.

In many ways these issues constitute the real questions and conflicts of The Edge of Impropriety. When you write a romance about young lovers, you can make them relatively free from responsibility and tantalizingly open to risk, experience, and transformation. But here I wanted to write about lovers who were tangled up in experience, in the pulls and stresses of memory and obligation — I worked hard to find physical metaphors for the way that life weaves us into its ongoing patterns. Marina and Jasper have been shaped and hurt by their separate lives and need to find their way home together. With a little help… but that would be giving things away.

RR: What’s next?

PR: Fan fiction. 😉 Well, sort of: I call it that to keep myself from getting too self-important. I’m at a very early stage right now, but my idea is to retell two classic English novels from the point of view of certain minor female characters I think the author gave the shaft to in the originals. I tell the “real” stories, of course, in a pair of sexy novellas. And no, I’m not telling which classic English novels.

Thanks so much for having me, Riskies.

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The economy is sadder than the Prince Regent confronting an empty larder.

And although the romance genre isn’t hurting as much as other genres, publishing houses are facing economic downturns.

Already, book retailers are warning that only the big names will be moving significant numbers, and houses taking chances on new names are decreasing. Random House is trying to combat the book malaise by launching a new campaign to spur sales: “Books=Gifts,” promoting the value of books as holiday gifts. Several big name authors such as Dean Koontz and Maya Angelou are lending their names and their words to the campaign, and Random House is not limiting its promotion to its own company’s books. The campaign reaches both old and new media outlets in its ad buys.

I love giving books, although I like best giving them TO ME. I find, however, that gift book giving is an idiosyncratic notion, because asking someone to read a book is a serious commitment. You can’t just toss something at them and expect them to jump right in.

How do you decide who to buy books for? What kinds of books do you buy? Do you always sneak in a book for yourself? Do you need help with suggestions for books for anyone on your list? What’s the oddest book someone has ever gotten for you?

Happy Book Buying!

Megan

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Elk: The Theory by A. Elk brackets Miss brackets. My theory is along the following lines.

Host: Oh God.

Elk: All brontosauruses are thin at one end, much MUCH thicker in the middle, and then thin again at the far end. That is the theory that I have and which is mine, and what it is too.

Monty Python, The Dinosaur Sketch

So my theory is…

It wasn’t bare arms, bosoms, or ankles, it was the bared nape of the neck that defines Regency gowns.

(Although with the lady at the right, you get the best of all worlds.)

Have you ever noticed how so many fashion prints show women with their necks crooked or bent, even if they’re covered by the brim of a hat or a ruff? Men, for the most part, were paying for ladies’ gowns, and while they might appreciate the bared skin, they might not want wives, daughters, mistresses to assume that just because they were dressed as a goddess, that they might assume immortals’ free behavior.

Women might not have to appear in public any more with heads and shoulders decently covered, but submissiveness was expected (unless they were extremely well-born and/or mad, bad, and dangerous to know).

I think there’s a great comparison here with the geisha’s kimono, cut to expose what in Japanese culture is a potent erotic zone–yes, the nape of the neck.

I have to admit I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot as I’ve been reading Pam Rosenthal‘s wonderful The Edge of Impropriety, in which clothes, and the massive changes in fashion of the first two decades of the nineteenth century, play a supporting role. Pam will be here as our Riskies guest this Sunday, November 16, to talk about the book and give away a signed copy.

And today I’m over at the Hoydens, talking about dumb luck in a box. Come and visit!

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