Author Archives: Sandra Schwab

At the Rhine

Updated on October 15, 2022 by Sandra Schwab

I’m a bit late with my post today as I spent the day at the Rhine with friends. And since I’ve already written about 19th-century travels on the Rhine, I thought it might be nice to share pictures of our day trip and add to them some descriptions from guidebooks from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

View of Koblenz with the “German Corner,” where the rivers Rhine and Mosel meet

We visited Koblenz, which Murray’s Handbook for Travellers on the Continent: Northern Germany of 1845 describes thus:

“Coblenz is a strongly fortified town on the left bank of the Rhine, and right of the Mosel. It received from the Romans the name Confluentes, modernised into Coblenz, from its situation at the confluence of these 2 rivers. It is the capital of the Rhenish provinces of Prussia, and its population, together with that of Ehrenbreitstein, including the garrison, is about 25,000.”

Ehrenbreitstein

Right across the Rhine from Koblenz lies the Ehrenbreitstein. Murray’s tells us the following about the fortress:

“Ehrenbreitstein (honour’s broad stone), the Gibraltar of the Rhine, connected with Coblenz by a bridge of boats. In order to enter it, it is necessary to have permission from the military commandant residing in Coblenz, which a valet-de-place will easily procure, on merely presenting the passport, or a card with the name of the applicant upon it.”

The garrison was destroyed by the French in 1801, but was rebuilt by the Prussians between 1817-1828 and, together with Koblenz on the other side of the river, was meant to protect the Middle Rhine.

Deutsches Eck

One of the most famous sights of Koblenz is the so-called German Corner (Deutsches Eck), where the river Mosel meets the Rhine. After Kaiser Wilhelm’s death in 1888, a colossal equestrian statue was erected here in commemorate the Kaiser who had brought about the German unification of 1871. The statue was finished in 1897.

Electoral Palace

Bradshaw’s Continental Railway Guide from 1913 has the following to say about other sights of Koblenz:

“The beautiful Rhein Anlagen (gardens and promenade) extends along the river front a little south of the boat bridge. Above and behind the Anlagen is the Schloss [i.e., the Electoral Palace], formerly a favourite residence of the German Imperial family; the royal apartments may be seen.”

Prussian government building and Koblenzer Hof

Government Palace and the hotel Koblenzer Hof

Bradshaw’s also mentions “the imposing Regierungspalast (Government office) with square peaked towers” as well as the “[n]ew first class hotel” right next to it, the Grand Hotel Belle Vue – Coblenzer Hof, which had just opened in spring 1913. The ad in the guidebook proudly points out that there’s “running water in every room.” 🙂

Ad from Bradshaw’s Continental Railway Guide (1913)

But not just the buildings along the Rhine are particularly nice, you can also find beautiful buildings when you walk through the town itself.

Pretty houses in Koblenz

And oodles of churches like the Liebfrauenkirche, which is dedicated to Mary.

Liebfrauenkirche, Koblenz

As you can see I had a truly wonderful day! 🙂 And I also had something to celebrate, namely the re-launch of my debut novel, The Lily Brand, which was published ten years ago by Dorchester. Here’s the blurb & the pretty new cover. Until the end of this week, you can still snatch it up for the launch price of $2.99.

Troy Sacheverell, fifth earl of Ravenhurst, was captured in France. He’d gone to fight Napoleon, but what he found was much more sinister. Dragged from prison to an old French manor on the outskirts of civilization, he was purchased by a rich and twisted widow. And more dangerous still was the young woman who claimed him.

Lillian had not chosen to live with Camille, her stepmother, but nobody escaped the Black Widow’s web. And on her nineteenth birthday, Lillian became Camille’s heir. Her gift was a plaything: a man to end her naiveté, a man perfect in all ways but his stolen freedom. Yet even as Lillian did as she was told, marked that beautiful flesh and branded it with the flower of her name, all she desired was escape. In another place, in another world, she’d desired love. Now, looking into burning blue eyes, she knew there was no place to run. No matter if should she flee, no matter where she might go, she and this man were prisoners of passion, inextricably linked by the lily brand.

And while her heart remained locked in ice, his burnt with hate. Would they ever find true happiness?

Get it on Amazon or Kobo

Posted in Former Riskies, Places | Tagged Rhine, Sandra Schwab | 2 Replies

Snuff

Updated on October 15, 2022 by Sandra Schwab

As I’m preparing my first two novels for re-release, I’m reminded of all the research I did while I was writing those first books for Dorchester and exploring the Regency period at the same time. In Bewitched, I had my hero and heroine buy presents for the hero’s family, and for some reason, I thought it would be an excellent idea if they bought snuff for his brother. And so I happily dived into all things to do with snuff…

By the Regency era, snuff had become the preferred choice of tobacco in the fashionable world and had largely replaced pipes and cigars. In this, the beau monde followed the example of dandy extraordinaire Beau Brummell, and what’s more, he also dictated how snuff was to be taken: According to Brummell, only one hand should be used to open one’s snuff box and transfer the snuff to the nose. To take a pinch of snuff in an offhand manner—even better: in the middle of a conversation!—without glancing at either snuff or snuff box and, most importantly, without grimacing, was considered the highest art. If you were clumsy or if you took too large a dose, you ran into danger of dribbling the snuff down your neckcloth or, even worse!, to stain your nose. (And now let’s all imagine a romance hero with… On second thought, let’s not.) (Ugh!)

Snuff-taking was an expensive habit—not only did the prices for snuff ran high, but the substance also had to be carried around in a suitable container: the snuff-boxes of the rich were pieces of intricate workmanship. The lids were often decorated with miniatures—some of them innocent, some of them… err… less so. (The latter were sometimes hidden on the inside lid or behind a sliding cover.)

The collecting of snuff boxes became a rich man’s hobby, and again, Beau Brummell was leading the fashion. According to his biographer William Jesse, among the boxes Brummell owned was one particularly intricate container: “His passion for snuff-boxes was extreme: he had one which he only could open, and some friend of his, while he was at Belvoir, tried it with his pen knife, with the intention, no doubt, of purloining his snuff, which was always excellent. Hearing of the outrage, Brummell said, ‘Confound the fellow; he takes my snuff box for an oyster.'” (from The Life of George Brummell, Esq.) (There are also slightly different versions of this particular anecdote.)

Indeed, you didn’t just share your snuff with anybody. Sharing snuff acted as a marker of favor and a sign of friendship: “If you knew a man intimately,” Gronow writes in Recollections and Anecdotes: A Second Series of Reminiscences (1863), “he would offer you a pinch out of his own box; but if others, not so well acquainted, wishes for a pinch, it was actually refused. In those days of snuff-taking, at the tables of great people, and the messes of regiments, snuff-boxes of large proportions followed the bottle, and everybody was at liberty to help himself.”

Snuff was provided in dry or moist versions, many of which were scented as well, with jasmine, orange flowers, musk roses, or bergamot. It came in different colours, ranging from yellow to brown, black or even purple. Detailed descriptions of different kinds of snuff can be found in Arnold James Cooley’s Cyclopaedia of Six Thousand Practical Receipts (1851):

“Among some of the most esteemed French snuffs are the following:—Tabac de cedrat, bergamotte, and neroli, are made by adding the essences to the snuff.—Tabac perfumée aux fleurs, by putting orange flowers, jasmins, tube-roses, musk-roses, or common roses, to the snuff in a close chest or jar, sifting them out after 24 hours, and repeating the infusion with fresh flowers as necessary. Another way is to lay paper pricked all over with a large pin between the flowers and the snuff.—Tabac musquée. Any scented snuff 1lb.; musk (grown to a powder with white sugar and moistened with ammonia water) 20 grs.; mix.”

(My hero & heroine eventually bought tabac de neroli.)

PS: Oh gosh, I’ve just discovered that back in 2006, there was a film about Beau Brummell based on Ian Kelly’s biography. With James Purefoy as Brummell and Matthew Rhys as Lord Byron. *swoons*

*swoons again*

Posted in Former Riskies, Regency, Research | 3 Replies

Falling Back in Time

Updated on October 15, 2022 by Sandra Schwab

First of all, let me apologize for the rather later and rather short post – I spent most of the day preparing a job application (or rather, I spent most of the day tearing my hair out over what to put into the cover letter for the aforementioned job application), and I feel as if my brain has been sucked dry.

In the night from Saturday to Sunday, the whole of the USA turned back their clocks, and the Historical Romance Network took the opportunity to celebrate our genre on social media with the hashtag #FallBackInTime: like last year, people posted selfies with historical romances. Elena, for example, took a picture of herself with one of her favorites from Mary Jo Putney.

Others ::cough:: me ::cough:: took pictures of their softies reading historical romances. Dragon, Corduroy Wes, and Vampire Teddy did a great job of modeling for me:

And soon, #FallBackinTime was joined by #WhyIReadHistoricalRomance and #WhyIWriteHistoricalRomance — quite fittingly as Sunday also marked the start of this year’s National Novel Writing Month when oodles of people worldwide sit down and begin writing a brandnew story. So it was indeed a good day to think about why we love our genre so much.

For me, it’s the history & the research. I cannot get enough of historical tidbits, historical gossip, the details of life in the past. And the research books! I love (love, love, love!!) obtaining new research material! 🙂

Fall Back in Time is also a good opportunity to add a few more historicals to your TBR. I picked up Royally Ever After, a bundle of two of Loretta Chase’s shorts, which were originally published in different novella collections. I particularly adored “Lord Lovedon’s Duel”, which has got a typical quirky Loretta-Chase heroine and features a most unusual device.

And now over to you: Why do you read (or write) historical romance? And what was the last historical you read?

Posted in Former Riskies, Reading | Tagged Fall Back in Time | 4 Replies

All the Bookish News!

Updated on October 15, 2022 by Sandra Schwab

Today I come to you with all kinds of bookish news: I’m currently knee-deep into the production of new print editions of all of my books. (It kind of hit me when I was preparing Eagle’s Honor: Ravished, which I have entered into the RITAs, for print that very few of my novels were actually available as paperbacks. So it was definitely beyond time to remedy that situation.) Moreover, a few weeks ago, I also discovered how to create drop caps in MS Word and since then I’ve been on a roll. As you can see from the picture above. 🙂

For the print edition of Castle of the Wolf, my Beauty & the Beast story, in which a young woman inherits a mysterious castle in the Black Forest, I chose a set of initial letters that reminded me of old fairy tale books. I thought that was quite fitting since fairy tales play a very important role in the story.

So this is the good part. However, overall Sandra’s Adventures in Print Publishing didn’t go quite that smoothly. The grumpy dude on the cover? He’s orange. “But, Sandy,” you might say, “he is not orange in that picture above.” Yeah. I know. I applied a number of filters to that picture above because I didn’t want to inflict his glow-in-the-dark color on anyone. So if you’d like to get a nice new edition of Castle, please wait a few days. I’m currently fixing it. (I just hope he doesn’t turn out to look like a zombie this time around.) (That’s what living in a run-down castle does to you: turns you into a zombie!)

But what *did* turn out really nicely is the frontispiece (see? I’m really on a roll here! hehe!): I did include a sketch of the Kastelburg in Waldkirch, upon which the castle in my novel is (partly) based. Here is a picture of the frontispiece in the making:

Annnnnnd in other bookish news, my grumpy centurion, whom I mentioned in my last post about doing portraits, is going to hit bookshelves this Friday. I so enjoyed telling Caius & Lucius’ story. I fell in love with these two when I first wrote them as secondary characters into Eagle’s Honor: Ravished, which is set ten years after The Centurion’s Choice, and I knew from almost the start that I very much wanted to tell their story as well.

For me, one of the great joys of writing the Eagle’s Honor series is that has expanded into an exploration of family relations across several generations as well as an exploration of family stories. Family stories formed an important part of my growing up – my paternal grandmother in particular liked telling me stories about the time when my father and his sisters were little, and sometimes also about the time when she was a young woman. And above my parents’ dining table there’s a huge collage of family pictures going back as far as the 1890s. So my own experiences of how people in my family talked about their past and about people from past generations I’ve never met, very much informed the way I have been approaching the stories the Florius family share.

I love imagining what kind of stories members of the Florius family would share about past generations and what kind of things would be passed from one generation to the next. And also imagine what sort of circumstances would interrupt this chain of oral traditions; in how far memories might change over time. For me, it’s a really nice way to link these stories that set apart several decades. (And of course, I hope readers will enjoy these links, too!)

But, of course, these family stories just form a tiny part of the background for The Centurion’s Choice, which at its heart is a enemies-to-friends-to-lovers story. With a very grumpy centurion. 🙂 (Watching those grumpy guys fall in love is always such great fun, isn’t it?) So without further ado, here’s the blurb for the novella. I will add buy links on Friday, when the book comes out.

It’s 178 AD, and barbarian tribes once again threaten the borders of the Roman Empire. To make matters worse, Lucius’ promotion in his auxiliary cohort has been denied, and instead the governor has appointed a moody, mean-tempered Roman to become the new centurion of the Septem Gallorum. And, incidentally, to trample all over Lucius’ ambitions.

Tall and burly, Centurion Caius Florius Corvus might be way too good-looking for Lucius’ peace of mind, but the man has also made it abundantly clear that he doesn’t trust Lucius as his second-in-command. Yet as they are swept into war and each has to shoulder his responsibilities, a reluctant respect begins to grow between them, which soon grows into friendship — and, perhaps, more?

Posted in Former Riskies, Writing | Tagged books, Gothic romance, Romans, Sandra Schwab | 1 Reply

Voices from Old London

Updated on October 15, 2022 by Sandra Schwab

The Strand, with Somerset House and Mary-le-Strand church. Published by Ackerman, 1836 (from Wikipedia)

This year I’m back in Victorian London, and as it so happens I’ve got a couple of new research books, among them Voices from Dickens’ London by Michael Paterson from 2006 (republished as Inside Dickens’ London). Right in the introduction Paterson makes a claim that I found both daring and electrifying:

“The city of Dickens is a place lost to us beyond recall. It is difficult to imagine its dirtiness and dnager and its extremes of wealth and poverty. Its people did not look, speak, smell or behave like us. The ways they dressed, the times at which they ate, the slang they used and the accents in which they talked, the ways in which they worked or celebrated or took their amusements, often bear no resemblance to our experience” (10).

As somebody who has walked through London several times, often with the specific intention tracing the sights and buildings of the early 19^th century, I found Paterson’s claim rather outrageous at first. After all, isn’t it our shared human experience that allows us modern readers to connect to characters in the literature of the past as well as to characters in historical fiction?

Today’s London is noisy and dirty and smells of exhaust fumes. Add to that the stink of piss and garbage in the back streets. How much worse could 19^th-century London have been? There would have been different smells, of course, not of exhaust fumes, but of horses and…

Open sewers.

Cess pits.

A river that stank to heaven and spread illness and disease.

The smell of this old London, Paterson writes,

“must have been overwhelming. First, there was the smell of coal fires.. The vast forest of reeking chimneys filled the air with smoke, which covered buildings with unsightly layers of soot and left dirty black smuts on clothes and faces. There were the multifarious stenches of industry: breweries, foundries and forges, chemical works and, worse than all of them, tanneries […]. There was also the aroma of horses, on which so much of London’s transport and commerce depended — the smell of a stable multiplied millionfold. There was the scent of hundreds of thousands of people, whose tightly packed lives did not allow them opportunities to keep themselves, their clothes or their homes clean” (18).

And as to the noise —

“However noisy today’s traffic may be, it is insignificant by comparison with the din that filled the city in Dickens’ time. Countless iron-shod wheels rattled all day over cobbled streets behind clopping horses. Shouting was constant as, without any form of traffic control, drivers relied on aggression to push their way through the crush of vehicles. The sounds, thrown back by the walls of narrow streets, was so loud that it would not be possible to hold a conversation on the pavement, nor to leave street-facing windows open in summer” (17).

An exaggeration? Perhaps, for after all, the street sellers were still able to hawk their wares. And there were street musicians, too — Italian boys with barrel organs or harps — and street performers of every kind.

No Big Ben, of course.

Some of the things Paterson considers strange — like the closure of all shops and museums on Sunday — don’t seem quite so strange to those who have a different cultural background than the author (in Germany, shops are closed on Sunday).

And yet, the London that emerges from the pages of Paterson’s book is indeed very different from the London of today. It also differs markedly from the London you get to see in most of those pretty TV adaptations of 19^th-century literature (with Dickens adaptation being the big exception).

As the title suggest, Voices from Dickens’ London relies heavily on primary texts by Victorian journalists, authors, and everyday people, which are quoted extensively (though not always quite accurately: ellipses are often unmarked). This makes Paterson’s book both fascinating reading material and a rather fantastic source — one I can highly recommend.

I wrote this post yesterday. Today, London was once again hit by catastrophe: This morning, a devastating fire started in Grenfell Tower in Kensington and killed and injured many people. My thoughts are with all those affected by the fire.

Posted in Former Riskies, History, Places, Research | Tagged London | Leave a reply