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Category: Regency

Happy Birthday, Elizabeth Barrett!

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March 6 marks the birthday of one of my favorite poets, Elizabeth Barrett Browning! (in 1806, so she would be, er, 206…). It also seems appropriate for a romance writers blog, since she and Robert Browning had one of the great romances in literary history…

Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett was born at Coxhoe Hall in County Durham, England, the eldest of the 12 children of Edward and Mary Barrett Moulton-Barrett (it seems like a good idea for her to just go by one of those Barretts…). The family’s fortune originated with family plantations in Jamaica, and were later reduced by a lawsuit and by the abolition of slavery in the UK. In 1809, after the birth of Elizabeth’s sister Henrietta, Edward bought Hope End in Herefordshire, and ideal place for raising a family. Elizabeth was educated at home, attending lessons with her brother’s tutor which gave her a firm foundation in languages and literature. By age 10, it was said she could recite Paradise Lost and various Shakespeare plays; her first poem was written at age 8, and by 12 she had written an “epic” poem of 4 books of rhyming couplets. At 14, her father paid for the publication of her Homeric-style poem The Battle of Marathon. During this time she was known as “a shy, intensely studious, precocious child, yet cheerful, affectionate, and lovable.” Her friend Mary Russell Mitford described her as “A slight, delicate figure, with a shower of dark curls falling on either side of a most expressive face; large, tender eyes, richly fringed by dark eyelashes, and a smile like a sunbeam.”

But by the age of 20, Elizabeth was felled by a mysterious illness, made worse by her use of morphine for the pain. In 1824, the London paper The Globe and Traveler printed her poem Stanzas on the Death of Lord Byron, around the same time her father’s Jamaica property began to go downhill. In 1826, she published her first collection of poems, but by 1830 Hope End had to be sold and the family moved 3 times between 1832 and 1837 (first to Sidmouth in Devonshire, where they lived for 3 years, then to Gloucester Place in London, where she wrote more poems and articles). Finally they settled at 50 Wimpole Street, where a family friend, John Kenyon, introduced Elizabeth to the literary luminaries of the day, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson, Carlyle, and Mary Russell Mitford (who became her good friend, and helped her to publish more of her work).

In 1838, at her doctor’s advice, Elizabeth went to live for a time at Torquay along with her brother Edward. His death by drowning there in 1840 sent her into a terrible downward spiral, and she returned to Wimpole Street as an invalid and recluse, kept company mostly by her beloved spaniel Flush. She kept writing, though, and in 1844 two volumes were published, A Drama of Exile, a Vision of Poets and Lady Geraldine’s Courtship. These volumes made her one of the most popular writers of the time and inspired Robert Browning to write her a fan letter. Kenyon arranged for them to meet in May 1845, and thus began the most famous courtship in literary history.

She was six years his elder and an invalid, and it took some time for Robert to persuade her that his love was real. Her doubts were expressed beautifully in her most famous volume, Sonnets From the Portugese, which she wrote over the next several months. They finally eloped to the church of St. Marylebone and then ran off to Florence, with Elizabeth disinherited by her father (who did the same to all his children who dared marry!). But she had some money of her own, and they sold their poems for a comfortable life and happy marriage in Italy. Her health improved in the sunny weather, and in 1849, at age 43, she gave birth to their son Robert, always called Pen. Her writing went well, too. In 1850, on the death of Wordsworth, she was shortlisted for the position of poet laureate, but it went to Tennyson.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning died on June 29, 1861 and was buried at the English Cemetery in Florence.

A few great sources on her life are:
Life of Elizabeth Browning, Glenn Everett (2002)
Dared and Done: The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, Julia Markus (1995)
Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning: A Creative Partnership, Mary Sanders Pollock (2003)

Who are some of your favorite poets?? What are some romantic couples in history you like to read about?

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, — I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! — and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
Posted in Former Riskies, Reading, Regency, Research | Tagged , | 4 Replies

Empire Adrift

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Happy Tuesday, everyone! It’s been weird around here the last few days, what with ducking tornados (that luckily didn’t come too close to my town–it’s always exciting here in Oklahoma in the spring!), battling a cold, and writing. But I enjoyed the time to hole up at home with a new box of book bargains from the Edward r. Hamilton catalog.

One of the books I ordered this time was Patrick Wilcken’s Empire Adrift: The Portugese Court in Rio de Janeiro, 1808-1821, and I loved reading more about this strange tale. I knew almost nothing about what happened to Portugal during the Peninsula Wars–it always gets overshadowed by Spain, and I don’t know much about the history of that country in general. One review quote called this “A brilliant account of a bizarre yet momentous event.” In 1807, the Portugese prince regent Dom Joao (regent for his mad elderly mother Queen Maria), with the French closing in on his country and the British bossing him around, decided to just pack up his entire court and government and go to his colony in Brazil to rule from there. Over 10,000 people hurriedly climbed aboard a fleet amid chaos and confusion, and after a dangerous, stormy voyage emerged in the tropics. They stayed there for 13 years, in a weird attempted recreation of their life in Lisbon amid the jungle. In addition to trying to rule an enemy-occupied country from across the ocean, they also contended with a highly disfunctional royal family (Dom Joao and his ambitious Spanish wife, Dona Carlotta, had long been bitterly estranged, even though they had 9 bickering kids, and their quarrels only got worse in the New World). 

I couldn’t help but imagine a story set amid characters like this! What would a European woman think of life in Brazil? How would she adjust? (the heir Dom Pedro’s bride, the Austrian archduchess Leopoldina, at first romanticized what life in the “innocent” new world would be like, but soon came to hate it, along with her husband, and long for her home). It was a fascinating story, one I enjoyed learning about.
What are some stories from history you were surprised to learn about? If you had lived in the Regency period would you have been brave enough to make a run for South America??
Posted in Former Riskies, Regency, Research | Tagged , | 3 Replies

Mourning Rituals

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“My Mother is preparing mourning for Mrs E. K. – she has picked her old silk pelisse to peices, & means to have it dyed black for a gown – a very interesting scheme.“  (Jane Austen, 1808)

I found out that July 18 marked the 195th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death in Winchester, so i thought I’d take a look at some of the mourning rituals from the Regency period.  (It’s easy to mistake all 19th century mourning as the very elaborate fashions and rituals laid out in the later Victorian era.  The Victorians loved their rituals, and anything that involved special jewelry!!)

Though there are so many examples of beautiful mourning clothes in Regency fashion plates (very chic to our modern eyes!), most people of Jane Austen’s station and means couldn’t go all out like that on new mourning wardrobes.  They would make do with re-doing and black dye (as in the quote above!), cover bonnets with crape, add black ribbons and hems, buy jet or hair jewelry, things like that.  Widows would wear matte black for about a year, then transition to muted half-mourning like lilacs, purples, grays, or even white. (White was a predominant mourning color in the medieval and Renaissance period, like in this portrait of Mary Queen of Scots in mourning for her first husband, the King of France–La Reine Blanche).

Men had it easier–their clothes were generally dark anyway, they could get away with black armbands, hatbands, etc.

I often imagine some people must have spent years of their lives in mourning clothes!   At least I like purple and black!

“I have lost a treasure, such a Sister, such a friend as never can have been surpassed, – She was the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow, I had not a thought concealed from her, & it is as if I had lost a part of myself…” Letter from Jane Austen’s sister Cassandra to her niece Fanny Knight, 1817

“This morning, a little before one o’clock, the funeral procession with the remains of the late universally-regretted Princess Charlotte, arrived here from Claremont. They were received at the lower Lodge, where she is to lie in state this day, previously to the interment at night. The mourning coach, in which were the infant and urn, proceeded to the chapel, where eight yeomen of the guard, in attendance, carried and deposited them in the vault. The procession of the hearse and five mourning coaches, preceded by a number of men on horseback, was escorted into the town from Egham by a party of the Royal Horse Guards. Although the hour at which it arrived was so very late, the road and streets through which it passed were lined with spectators.”  “Blackwood’s Magazine” on the funeral of Princess Charlotte





The grave has closed over the mortal remains of the greatest hero of our age, and one of the purest-minded men recorded in history. Wellington and Nelson sleep side by side under the dome of St. Paul’s, and the national mausoleum our of isles has received the most illustrious of its dead. With pomp and circumstances, a fervour of popular respect, a solemnity and a grandeur never before seen in our time, and in all probability, not to be surpassed in the obsequies of any other hero heretofore to be born, to become the benefactor of this country, the sacred relics of Arthur Duke of Wellington have been deposited in the place long since set apart by the unanimous design of his countrymen. . . . all the sanctity and awe inspired by the grandest of religious services performed in the grandest Protestant temple in the world, were combined to render the scene, inside and outside of St. Paul’s Cathedral on Thursday last, the most memorable in our annals. . . . .Illustrated London News on the funeral of the Duke of Wellington (1852)

Whose funeral from history would you like to attend???  And isn’t that mourning gown from La Belle Assemblee not the most gorgeous?

Posted in Former Riskies, Jane Austen, Regency, Research | Tagged , | 2 Replies

The Lady Who Broke The Rules!

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The Riskies welcome back Marguerite Kaye, who is here to talk about her new release, the third in the “Castonbury Park” series from Harlequin Historicals….

Slave to Love! And a Giveaway

The Lady Who Broke the Rules is my book from the Regency upstairs/downstairs series Castonbury Park. My heroine is Lady Kate, the eldest daughter of the wealthy Montague family, a philanthropist and abolitionist. My hero is Virgil Jackson, a freed slave.
The Riskies welcome back Marguerite Kaye, who is here to talk about her new release, the third in the “Castonbury Park” series from Harlequin Historicals….
‘We want scandal, scandal, scandal,’ our editor told us eight authors when we first embarked on the ‘Castonbury Park’ journey, and a freed black slave seemed to me like a brilliant starting point. Any man who could survive the horrors of slavery and succeed on his own terms as Virgil does would have to be unbelievably strong-willed, yet at the same time, coming from such a traumatic background, he had to have some deep-seated issues of his own to contend with. Virgil is a free man, but he’s still a slave to his past
The history of slavery is a complex, emotive and controversial subject, one that has always fascinated me, but I have to admit there where times when I thought I’d taken a step too far in making a freed slave a romantic hero. However, with the Castonbury Park series is set at a time when slavery was being challenged in both the Old and the New Worlds, I’m always keen to push boundaries in my stories, so I stuck with it, and I’m glad I did.
The Lady Who Broke the Rules is set in 1816. In the United States, the trade of slaves was abolished in the north in 1804, after which manumission in those states gathered momentum. In the south though, cotton was in increasing demand (paradoxically thanks to the north’s industrialisation of textile manufacture), slaves were a hugely important part of the economy, and resistance to abolition was significant.
Virgil was born into slavery in the south and freed in the north. He was one of the fortunate ones who came to true eminence and used his wealth to give others the chances he had had to make for himself. Though in reality this kind of success was rare, it was not unheard of. Robert Purvis is just one example of the black philanthropists from whom I took inspiration for Virgil, but his entrepreneurial side is an amalgamation of a whole number of black men and women who flourished in Nineteenth Century Boston, renting out real estate, setting up restaurants and beauty parlours, making shoes and clothes for the mass market, taking on the Establishment by training as lawyers and doctors.
Across the pond, a huge number of aristocratic families had derived a large part of their wealth from plantations in the West Indies which relied on slavery, but their influence was on the decline. The actual trade of slaves became illegal in 1807, and although it was not until 1833 that slavery itself was abolished, by 1816 the growing Abolitionist movement, coupled with the decline of the economic significance of the West Indies plantations, made the idea, if not the reality, of slavery much less politically and socially acceptable than it had been a decade or so before.
My research for The Lady Who Broke the Rules taught me that a large number of the British abolitionists were women, and so I made my heroine, Lady Kate Montague, one of them. It was one of the few political causes in which it became acceptable for women to participate, and in which women took a leading and influential role. I relished the opportunity to create a heroine who could, without it seeming a historical anachronism, be active politically and philanthropically. Josiah Wedgewood’s daughter Sarah, who introduces Kate to Virgil, was just one real life example I drew on when writing her.
There’s a huge difference between perception and reality. Kate, like me, had only read about slavery. Virgil had experienced it. As a writer, I had to try and imagine myself in both sets of shoes. Whether I’ve managed it or not – well, that’s for you to decide.
I have a signed copy of Kate and Virgil’s story to give away. Just leave a comment for a chance to win.
The Lady Who Broke the Rules (Castonbury Park 3) is out in October in the UK, digital only in the US and Canada, though it will be released in a print duo (Ladies of Disrepute) with Book 4 in December. Here is the blurb:
‘Your rebellion has not gone unnoticed…’ Anticipating her wedding vows and then breaking off the engagement has left Kate Montague’s social status in tatters. She hides her hurt at her family’s disapproval behind a resolutely optimistic facade, but one thing really grates…For a fallen woman, she knows shockingly little about passion! Could Virgil Jackson be the man to teach her? A freed slave turned successful businessman, his striking good looks and lethally restrained power throw normally composed Kate into a tailspin! She’s already scandalised society, but succumbing to her craving for Virgil would be the most outrageous thing Kate’s done by far…
There’s excerpts, background and more about my books on www.margueritekaye.com.
Posted in Former Riskies, Giveaways, Guest, Regency, Research | Tagged , , | 7 Replies

Guest Blogger Helen Dickson

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Book number two in the Castonbury Park series, The Housemaid’s Scandalous Secret by Helen Dickson, is out in September!  Helen visits us today to share the duties of a Regency-era maid–do you think you could carry them out??  Comment for a chance to win a copy…
DUTIES OF A LADY’S MAID
Her education should be superior to that of the ordinary class of females. She must be neat and clean in her person and dress, have strict regard to religious and moral obligations, be of a cheerful disposition and courteous in demeanour. Her character must be remarkable for industry and moderation and her deportment for modesty and humility. She must never betray her lady’s confidence, and must devote herself to those she is engaged to serve.
It is her duty to put in readiness everything her mistress may require to wear during the day and for dinner. She must dress and undress her mistress, and in this she should be knowledgeable, quick, and to manifest good taste by suiting the jewellery and decoration of her dress to the complexion, age and general appearance of her lady’s person. She must be an excellent hairdresser and have a good knowledge of remedies for beauty treatments – from getting rid of pimples, freckles, thickening and strengthening hair, to bad breath and toothache.
She is responsible for repairing and removing stains, to wash the lace and fine linen. When not in attendance she retires to her workroom where she employs herself at needle-work and to be available at all times if needed. 
 
She must wait up for her mistress to return from evening engagements, and when she has retired she has to carefully examine her clothes and do all that is necessary to be done to them before she folds them away and puts away her jewels. Only then can she seek her own bed.
If her mistress is elderly or infirm, she will be required to bring her work and sit with her, to sometimes read to her and administer her medicines.
She is allowed to walk out in the afternoons (depending on her lady’s indulgence) and to attend church on Sundays. 
 
The wages of a lady’s-maid vary depending on the income and expenditure of the family that employs her – between eighteen and twenty-five guineas per anum.
Helen Dickson
Posted in Former Riskies, Giveaways, Guest, Regency, Research | Tagged , , | 13 Replies