Risky Regencies – The original, riskiest and forever the friskiest Regency Romance blog

Your First Historical?

September 7, 2015 September 7, 2015 diane 10 Comments

Do you remember the first book of historical fiction you ever read?

For me it was I Was There With Ethan Allen And The Green Mountain Boys. I don’t remember how old I was. Probably third or fourth grade and I can’t recall anything about the story except that it placed a boy about my age into the excitement of a dramatic moment in history. The whole premise of the series was placing a boy (not a girl) in a dramatic moment in history.

I tried to find something about the book, but it seems to have disappeared. If it has been re-released it lost the I Was There With part of the title. (This is not the correct book cover either)

The next historically set book I fell in love with was Little Women, definitely a book to win the hearts of little girls. It did not have the excitement of the Green Mountain Boys, but I cried buckets when Beth died and I wanted to throw the book against the wall when Laurie doesn’t wind up with Jo. I think I was hot-wired for Romance fiction even then.

I was also a voracious reader of Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames (anyone remember Cherry Ames books?). While technically not historicals, they took place in a time period that seemed a distant past to a little bookworm like myself. I loved that Nancy Drew drove a “roadster” and that Cherry Ames traveled to exciting places. I still remember a scene in one book where Nancy and Ned get caught in quicksand and Ned lifts her out. In Cherry Ames, I remember that head nurses were always scolding her for wearing rouge, but, you see, her cheeks were just naturally rosy.

A huge appeal for me at the time in the Nancy Drew books was her relationship with Ned Nickerson. Whenever Ned showed up, I perked up. Romance, even then. Cherry Ames had the occasional romance and I liked that part of her stories as much as the other parts.

I don’t remember reading a great deal of historical books in my teen years. I read what was assigned in school and that is how I read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Both made an impression on me, because, unlike all of the above books besides Little Women, I remember the stories, but I’m not sure I can say I remember them fondly. There was cruelty in both books and I didn’t like it. And, even at a tender age, I scoffed at Jane Eyre winding up in a ditch and then getting rescued by–who else?–long lost relatives.

Somewhere in my teen years I also read Pride and Prejudice, but I only vaguely remembered the story.

In college I majored in English and I focussed on English Literature as opposed to American Literature. I am woefully unread in F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and John Steinbeck as a result. I did take a Black Literature course (that is what it was called in those days), for which I am profoundly grateful. I was introduced to writers I never would have read – Ralph Ellison, Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin. I also read a fair amount of Thomas Hardy in college and was in the midst of an independent study course on D.H. Lawrence when my college experienced its own dramatic moment in history. It closed early after the Kent State shootings.

It took me some time to discover Regency Historicals, but once I did, I knew I’d found my home!

What was your first Historical?

And speaking of Historicals, come join the Harlequin Historical Spotlight over at eHarlequin. We’ll be chatting all month.

Regency Fairytales

September 4, 2015 September 3, 2015 Gail Eastwood 10 Comments

Are you a fan of fairytales? Do you watch the mash-up Once Upon a Time on TV? Or the more horror-oriented show Grimm? I’ve been working with a writing student whose project is focused on the life of Charles Perrault, so I’ve been thinking about fairytales a lot lately.

This enduring, and endearing, form of storytelling goes back in time well before our Regency period to the late the 17^th century. That’s when Perrault published “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood” as part of his collection, Tales and Stories of Times Past with Morals: Tales of Mother Goose in 1697. (The English translation was published in 1729.) Actually, it goes back much further into the mists of time, depending on how you define fairytale vs folktale. Many of the stories are ancient, and of course there are some very ancient story traditions in the non-western cultures. But did you know that the Brothers Grimm published their first three German collections of tales in 1812, 1815, and 1822? Their first English edition was published in London in 1824, illustrated by Cruikshank.

Recasting some fairytales into romances has been a popular strategy for some authors within the romance genre. Turning them back into tales for adults is ironic in some cases, as some of the stories started out as strictly adult fare. But in addition to offering us plot ideas and possible story arcs, fairytales can serve in our stories exactly as they are, as part of the cultural background for our characters.

It’s good to know that if you want a character to read fairytales to children in a Regency story, any of those collected by Charles Perrault would be authentic. That includes such favorites as Cinderella, Puss in Boots, and Little Red Riding Hood. However, the late date of the Grimm Brothers’ English edition means some other best-loved stories, such as Snow White or Rumpelstiltskin, were not familiar in most Regency nurseries.

It’s possible, however, that some of the stories Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm had collected up to 1815 could have been retold in England by returned soldiers or statesmen who encountered Jacob Grimm in Paris or particularly in Vienna. That is how Devenham, the rakish hero of my 2^nd Regency, The Persistent Earl, knows the story of the frog prince and recounts a cleaned-up version of it to the children in that book. (Some of this blogpost is taken from the Author’s Note I wrote for that book, a time-saving step for which I beg your indulgence!)

Jacob Grimm worked for his government during the closing years of the Napoleonic Wars. In 1814-15 he served at the Congress of Vienna in addition to making two trips to Paris to recover important German paintings and books stolen by the French army. In Vienna he was the nucleus of a small literary salon whose members entertained each other with the telling and retelling of folk tales and fairytales. (Side note: apparently Wilhelm was struggling in the meanwhile back in their homeland. A novel just released in July, The Wild Girl, by Kate Forsyth, tells the story of the woman who loved Wilhelm and waited ten years to marry him!)

Many of these stories were not originally intended for children, and were only made suitable after the Grimms modified, edited, and in some cases embellished them for publication. (a Regency precedence for Disney!) Jacob’s store of tales in Vienna would have included those already published in the 1812 German Nursery and Household Tales, plus others like “The Frog Prince” about to make their appearance in the second volume.

Here is an excerpt from TPE where my naughty hero (still recovering from wounds received at Waterloo) explains about the story my heroine, Phoebe, has just overheard him tell:

“I spent a few weeks on furlough in Vienna last winter, and that is where I chanced to hear the story. In fact, if I can remember them, I heard several others I could tell the children besides that one. There was a scholarly fellow there for the Congress, part of the Hessian delegation, who collects these kinds of stories, and he had formed a little group in Vienna who delighted in exchanging them to pass the time.”

Phoebe saw the wicked light that she had learned to recognize so well come into his eyes, and she quickly turned away to fluff his pillows. What could possibly be wicked about fairytales? And where was Mullins? She realized suddenly that both he and the tea tray had disappeared.

“I must add that many of these stories had more than one version,” Devenham continued. “I saw ladies far less reputable than you put to the blush. Some of the French and Italian stories I heard were enough to curl even my hair. Of course, I would never repeat those to children.”

Over time, the Grimm brothers published some 200 tales. However, the edition we know today as Grimms’ Fairytales was not published until 1857.

What are your favorite fairytales? Have you ever used one in a story? Have you read (or written) any romances based on one? Let me know in the comments!

(P.S. If you were wondering, The Persistent Earl is one of my backlist books that has been reissued as an ebook by Penguin Intermix. The original paperback version is out of print.)

Greetings from Oxford

September 2, 2015 October 15, 2022 Sandra Schwab 4 Comments

I’m currently on vacation in Oxford (and I’m typing this on my phone so that should be… er… interesting. Now when you think of Oxford, there are of course the colleges…

Christ Church

…and Radcliffe Camera (part of the ginormous Bodleian Library)….

Radcliffe Camera

…and the Bridge of Sighs, which links the two halves of Hertford College.

The Bridge of Sighs

But what I found most impressing are the grazing sites that have been in use for hundreds of years. There is Christ Church Meadow, which as the name suggests is part of the college grounds – and it’s also home to the college’s herd of longhorn cattle.

Christ Church Meadow with the college cattle

And then there’s Port Meadow, where I took a long, long, oh-gosh-my-feet-hurt walk today. It is mentioned as a piece of common land in the Domesday Book, a survey of English landholdings comissioned by William the Conqueror after the Norman Conquest in the eleventh century. And since then, Port Meadow has been in continuous use as grazing grounds.

Port Meadow

Indeed, it was used as common grazing grounds ever since Alfred the Great granted all freemen of Oxford the right to use this piece of land as a reward for their bravery against the vikings. But even before that time, the land hadn’t been ploughed for thousands of years.

How intriuguing to imagine the seemingly endless stream of generation upon generation of cows that have grazed here!

The small village of Binsey to the west of Port Meadow

The history of the English countryside is not necessarily something that features heavily in our books, so walking across Port Meadow today served as a nice reminder of the importance of that history and how it has helped to shape the country we all love so much!

A Day Out of Time.

August 31, 2015 August 31, 2015 Mary Blayney 7 Comments

Fun is the word whenever I welcome Lavinia Kent to the Riskies. Lavinia is a good friend of mine and though we write in the same genre we are miles apart in our approach to the period. I tend toward the traditional and Lavinia writes hot in about a hundred different shades. I love what she has to say here. Read on and see what you think.

Belly dancers. Pirates garbed in black. Fairies with flower wings. Woodland warriors with full wolf masks. Friars, satyrs and pixies. A steampunk gentleman.

What do any of these things have to do with the other?

A glorious afternoon spent at the Renaissance Festival answers that question. Do any of these things belong there? No – and Yes, Yes, Yes. I love the anachronism of the Festival. I love the joy people take in their costumes even when they make no sense. Few of the costumes are directly related to England under Henry the Eighth. Somehow it just doesn’t matter.

Some of the garb is timely to the basic period but still the differences can be great, the costumes differing by centuries.

As I sat and watched the people go by, I considered how to make them work for the period, what story to tell to make each piece fit. Why was that group wearing hats of fabulously colored ribbons? Was somebody throwing a masquerade and required that all the guests come dressed that way?

And why was a party of pirates walking down the center of the street and nobody reacting? Was a prodigal son returning and all his friends chose to dress in a similar fashion to make him feel at home?

And where did the belly dancers come from? Were they heading to some other foreign land and after a great storm came to shore on England’s coast in all their bells and scarves? Or did some crusader knight return with a retinue of fair dancers who didn’t know how to dress for the English winter?

And the steampunk gentleman? Clearly a time traveller lost by a century or two now doing his best to fit in.

For each passerby I could find a story and a reason.

And that made me think about my own writing. I’ve always acknowledged that I am research light. I love the characters and the story more than the facts. But, and it’s a BIG but, I work hard to not get anything wrong. I may skim over a detail, if I can’t find a ready source, but if I put a goldfish in the pond I do the work to be sure that goldfish or koi had already arrived from China. And I’ve spent countless hours looking up words to see when they came in to use and whether they were used the same way they are now.

So why do I love the anachronisms of the Festival? Because the inspiration I find in them. And the same is true in my writing. I love the challenge of explaining why my heroine’s viewpoints might not be traditional for the age, why she knows more (or less) than the other women around her. It’s fascinating to explain why an elderly woman clings to the corsets of fifty years before.

I don’t like it when history is wrong, but there is something wonderful when an author can add an oddity and make it work. I worked along the lines of this premise when creating Ruby, Madame Rouge in my Bound and Determined series. I wanted to create a multi-faceted woman who could run a successful brothel, go to church with her grandparents and put on the airs of any great lady plus she had to know about textiles and how to sum a patron up by the cloth of his trousers.

I am not going to give all the secrets of her past, but I will say that having a duke for a father and his well bred, but not quite well enough bred, mistress for a mother was an easy place to start.

And then came the fun of figuring out how to bring each heroine to Madame Rouge’s house. Surely no true lady would ever visit such a place – or would she?

What would make each individual make the choice to do something so out character?Answering those questions is what makes the writing such fun and hopefully the reading as well. I’ve had a different answer in each of books, Mastering the Marquess and Bound by Bliss and in my September novella, Sarah’s Surrender, I work to find one more, to explain why a gentleman would ever bring his love of years before to such a scandalous establishment as Madame Rouges.

What sparks your imagination? As a reader are you curious about what inspiration lurks behind the title?

Finally, thank you for having me. I always love the chance to stop by Risky Regencies.

Thank you , Lavinia. We all enjoy having you with us!

Sarah Eagle book winner

August 30, 2015 August 30, 2015 Gail Eastwood Leave a comment

LadyVengeance-330 I apologize for the delay in announcing the winner of Lady Vengeance, the giveaway book by Sarah Eagle offered in her two-part post about the Waterloo Anniversary at the end of last month. The delay is entirely my fault, not hers –August has been crazy-busy!! I am happy to announce that the winner of her book, chosen at random, is faithful reader bn100. I will be emailing her to arrange the book delivery. Thank you to everyone who commented on Sally’s posts!