Category: Regency

A Bit of Scandal

Updated on October 15, 2022 by Sandra Schwab

Yesterday was release day for A TASTE OF SCANDAL, a multi-author box set I contributed to. Indeed, even the cover is so scandalous that Facebook wouldn’t let one of us boost her “Hooray! New release! With pretty new cover!!!” post. Because, you see, you can plainly discern a man’s neikkid back and shoulder. *gasp*

And biceps!

Let’s not forget that lovely biceps!!! *pats screen*

(I do hope you’re keeping your smelling salts nearby in case you’re overcome by so much scandalous scandalousness!)

And here’s is the scandalous blurb:

Heat up your history with eight amazing novels from USA Today bestselling authors and brand new voices [and, well, me] in this box set! From Regency ballrooms to Victorian bedrooms [and garden follies adorned by giant stone pineapples!!!] [how could you possibly resist those stone pineapples?!!?], there’s something here for every lover of steamy, sexy historical romance. Scottish highlanders, noble spies, and witty aristocrats use humor, wits, and intrigue to get whatever — and whoever — they desire. But these daring heroes meet their match when they encounter bewitching beauties who want more than just a taste of scandal…

(In case you wonder: the fabulous Elizabeth Cole aka the mastermind behind this box set wrote the blurb. Now I just need to find out how I can get her to write all my future blurbs.)

If you don’t quite know how to become properly scandalous yourself, never fear: We have assembled a list of handy tips from some of our heroes & heroines on how to be truly scandalous. Let’s start with a bit of a garden theme:

“If you suspect a beautiful, unmarried woman is a spy, lead her to a dark garden where you can kiss her senseless while discovering whether she has hidden assets.” ~ Sebastien Thorne from A HEARTLESS DESIGN by Elizabeth Cole

“Garden follies (even those adorned by giant stone pineapples!) are most wonderfully suitable for seduction.” ~ Sebastian “Fox” Stapleton from BEWITCHED by Sandra Schwab

For our next tip, you don’t need a garden, but having a brother is kind of essential:

“Blame everything on your roguish brother so that your darkest secret will never be revealed to the woman you love.” ~ Patrick Rochester from DARK PERSUASION by Vicki Hopkins

So far, our list might lead you to think that only romance heroes have scandal on their minds. But nothing could be further from the truth! So let’s hear from two of our heroines:

“The easiest way to get one’s self married is to make a man dizzy with desire. And not let him get undizzy until after the wedding.” ~ Elinor from TO WED THE WIDOW by Megan Bryce

The next one is my personal favorite. It’s a great line to use when you have to deal with a stubborn or annoying hero:

“I don’t think I could kill you, even though you deserve it. They would probably behead me at the Tower if I murdered a duke.” ~ Elizabeth from EDUCATING ELIZABETH by Kate Pearce

If you want to find out about all the scandalous things that happen in A TASTE OF SCANDAL, you can pick up your copy for just 99 cents at the following sites:

Amazon US | Amazon UK | Amazon CA | Apple itunes | Kobo

And now let’s hear from you: What is the best scandalous thing you’ve ever encountered in a romance novel?

Leave a comment for a chance to win a signed copy of the very first edition of BEWITCHED (yes, that would be the old Dorchester edition from 2008) (and yes, I still have a few brand new copies of that edition), my contribution to the box set. I’m going to pick a winner (randomly chosen) on Sunday, 11 October.

Posted in Former Riskies, Giveaways, Regency | Tagged new release, Sandra Schwab | 7 Replies

Twelfth Night Customs: Wassailing the Apple Trees

Updated on October 15, 2022 by Sandra Schwab

illustration of wassailing the apple trees

Illustration by Birket Foster, from Christmas with the Poets (1851)

Today is Epiphany, the day when Christians celebrate the arrival of the Three Magi (or Three Wise Men or Three Kings) with (not particularly useful) presents for Baby Jesus. In some countries, like Spain, this is still the day when children are given their Christmas presents.

While in the English tradition today, Epiphany simply marks the day when you are supposed to take down the Christmas tree and all your other Christmas decoration, back in the Regency era, Epiphany formed a very important part of the whole Christmas festivities as it marked the end of the 12 Days of Christmas.

Especially the evening before Epiphany, Twelfth Night or Twelfth Day’s Eve, was a time for fun and partying with dancing and drinking. In importance, the celebrations were second only to Christmas.

In the country, Twelfth Night was in many places the time for the custom of wassailing the fruit trees, especially the apple trees, in the orchards. The custom was common in most of the southern and western counties of England, though the date could vary, and in some places, the wassailers would visit the orchards several days in a row (hey, it’s a good excuse for a night out with your buddies!).

Typically, the wassailers would go to the orchards at night with lanterns in order to sing songs (no doubt some of them were a bit… eh… vulgar) under the fruit trees and making a great racket by beating against pans and drums. Then the trees (or just the best tree in the orchard) would be beaten with sticks, before cider was poured over the roots (the order of these actions might vary from place to place). According to popular superstition, this would ensure a fruitful year and a good harvest in the next autumn.

In Christmas with the Poets, the following lyrics are given for a typical wassailing song:

“Here’s to thee, old apple tree,
Whence thou may’st bud, and though may’st blow!
And whence though may’st bear apples enow!
Hats full! Craps full!Bushel – bushel – sacks full!
And my pockets full too! Huzza!”

If you look at the illustration above, I’d say it strongly suggests that the wassailers had to try the cider too before giving it to the apple tree (I mean, where would be the fun of going wassailing, if you can’t have a bit of drink yourself, right?)

Today, wassailing the apple trees is very popular with revivalists, who nowadays often wear costumes when visiting the orchards. Sometimes, as in Chesterfield, this is also paired with Morris Dancing:

And speaking of trees: last summer I went to the Black Forest and was interviewed by Michael Portillo about the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm for the BBC documentary Great Continental Railway Journeys. The episode with yours truly was broadcast last November. If you’d like to see me walking through a very, very muddy forest, you can check out a rather bad quality version of the interview here (the sides of the film have been cut off). 🙂

Posted in Former Riskies, Regency | Tagged Customs, Twelfth Night | 4 Replies

Cranford & the Social Aspects of Needlework

Updated on October 15, 2022 by Sandra Schwab

A lavender sachet with an embroidered rabbit

A lavender sachet with a rabbit, embroidered by the author

I thought for today’s post, I’d elaborate a little on my February post about needlework, and talk about the social aspects of needlework. As any crafter knows, there is an immense satisfaction in gifting your work to your friends and family (especially when they actually appreciate handmade things). I love giving handmade blankets and softies to the children of my friends, and among the women of my grandmother’s generation, embroidered handkerchiefs were popular presents.

Like today, needlework often served as a means to strengthen (female) relationships in the Regency era. And in 19th-century literature this is nowhere better reflected than in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford stories. They were first published in the early 1850s, but most of them are set at a much earlier date, in the 1830s and 40s, and the genteel, yet impoverished ladies of Cranford maintain rules of etiquette that are remnants from even earlier decades.

With Cranford, Gaskell entered a contemporary debate about whether women were able to form and maintain true friendships with members of their sex. As female friendships and female communities form such an important part of the Cranford stories, it perhaps not surprising that we are granted a much more detailed glimpse at the domestic life and work of women than in other literary works of the time.

In the village of Cranford it is the little kindnesses that help to maintain and strengthen the community, and those kindnesses often take the form of handmade things or homemade remedies. In Chapter 2, the narrator tells us:

I had often occasion to notice the use that was made of fragments and small opportunities in Cranford; the rose-leaves that were gathered ere they fell to make into a potpourri for someone who had no garden; the little bundles of lavender flowers sent to strew the drawers of some town-dweller, or to burn in the chamber of some invalid. Things that many would despise, and actions which it seemed scarcely worth while to perform, were all attended to in Cranford.

The women in Cranford keep in touch with absent friends by writing letters, and needlework plays an important role in forming new friendships and deepening existing ones. Thus,

Miss Pole and Miss Jessie Brown had set up a kind of intimacy on the strength of the Shetland wool and the new knitting stitches […].

And similarly, the relationship between Miss Pole and Mary, the narrator, who is only an occasional visitor to Cranford, deepens thanks to crochet:

There was Miss Pole, who was becoming as much absorbed in crochet as she had been once in knitting, and the burden of whose letter was something like, “But don’t you forget the white worsted at Flint’s” of the old song; for at the end of every sentence of news came a fresh direction as to some crochet commission which I was to execute for her.

As a result of those crochet commissions, Miss Pole invites Mary to stay with her at the beginning of Chatepr 3, and again, needlework is featured prominently:

There was all the more time for me to hear old-world stories from Miss Pole, while she sat knitting, and I making my father’s shirts. I always took a quantity of plain sewing to Cranford; for, as we did not read much, or walk much, I found it a capital time to get through my work.

When Peter, Miss Matty’s long-lost brother, returns to Cranford towards the end of the collection, he brings with him a beautiful Indian muslin gown. But because Miss Matty has grown too old for such finery, the gown is reserved for Miss Jessie Brown’s daughter and thus becomes yet another means to strengthen the cross-generational bonds. This gives us a glimpse of how fabric could become imbued with love and kinship. In Miss Weeton: Journal of a Governess 1811-1825 we find a letter from Ellen Weeton to her daughter, where she describes the bundle of fabrics she is sending along with the letter to be made into a patchwork quilt:

Print for patchwork is sold by weight, in small bits such as I have sent you. I purchased it at Prescot market […] The piece of patchwork is out of an old Quilt I made above 20 years ago […] The Hexagon in the middle was a shred of our best bed hangings; they were Chintz, from the West Indies, which my father brought home with him from one of his voyages.

As we can see, fabric was not only repurposed and passed down in the family, it could also become the carrier of family stories and histories – a process that will be no doubt familiar to many modern quilters!

And that was it from me for this month. When I post the next time, in March, I’ll have some big news to share with you, involving, among other things that cute red-haired woman below. 🙂

And now, let’s hear it from you: Do you have any kind of handmade item that is part of your family history or reminds you of a dear friend?

Posted in Former Riskies, Regency | Tagged Elizabeth Gaskell, needlework, Sandra Schwab | 4 Replies

So you want to review books? (The 1816 edition)

Updated on October 15, 2022 by Sandra Schwab

Are you a reader with a most impressive number of reviews on Goodreads? Do you run a book blog or write for a review site? Do you LOVE talking about books? But do you worry what would happen if you traveled to Scotland, admired some pretty stone circle, and quite accidentally tumbled 200 years into the past?

Never fear! I have a few most excellent tips for you so you won’t have to forgo reviewing books even while trxing to navigate the delicate politics of Regency ballrooms! In the growing bookmarket of the early 19th century yours will be a welcome new voice!

You are a woman and you fear reviewing books might forever ruin your reputation and destroy all your chances of Mr. Darcy ever sparing you a glance? Rest assured, there is no need to worry as reviews are published anonymously in the periodical press.

Now let’s see what kind of magazine would suit your reviewing style best.

Do you like to write really long (REALLY long) reviews? Then I suggest you try a literary quarterly. You’ve got three months between issues so be prepared to really delve into a book. Reviews of potentially popular books by eminent authors should not be shorter than 30 pages (for new novels by Britain’s most beloved authors such as the author of Waverley, consider 50 pages a bare minimum – though reviews can be published in installments). You may insert large chunks of text and may summarize the rest of the novel to allow people who don’t have the patience to read a complete three-decker (that’s three-volume) novel (or who don’t have the money to buy all three volumes) may still form an opinion on the novel and discourse freely about the plot and the principal characters.

If you prefer slightly shorter reviews, a monthly magazine might suit you better. Monthly magazines are also most suitable for those of you who’d like to review musical publications, including sheet music. The June 1816 issue of The Gentleman’s Magazine includes reviews on Complete Instructions for the Harp (by J.B. Msyer, Professor of the harp), A Dictionary of Musick (by J. Bottomly) (what a most delightful name!), and The Comet Waltz, “arranged as a Rondo for the Pianoforte or Harp. pp. 4”:

“This rather pleasing Air is eked out into a rondo with little skill, forming a lesson that may interest learners, and requiring very little power of execution.”

Oh dear. I guess that is a case of damned with faint praise…

If you must criticize a work, this is an acceptable way of doing so. However, in general it is adviceable to refrain from writing too critical a review. After all, your main aim is to suggest to your readers wbich books they ought to read. If you timetravel to 1817 or a later year, this advice is no longer valid: When William Blackwood launched his Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1817, he introduced the snark to literary criticism. Consider the following snippet from the review of Harold the Dauntless: A Poem:

“This is an elegant, sprightly, and delightful little poem, written apparently by a person of taste and genius,but who either possesses not the art of forming and combining a plot, or regards it only as a secondary and subordinate object. In this we do not widely differ from him, but are sensible, meantime, that many others will; and that the rambling and uncertain nature of the story, will be the principal objection urged against the poem before us, as well as the greatest bar to its extensive popularity.”

Ouch.

That kind of snark, combined with attacks on such literary icons as Byron, proved to be a most excellent marketing strategy and made the reputation of the magazine across the English-spesking world. Indeed during the early years of its existence, Blsckwood’s paid a small fortune in libel damages. Ooops.

But evidently, this kind of notoriety served its purpose: everybody was talking about Blackwood’s, and it ran until 1980. Not too bad, eh?

Posted in Former Riskies, Regency | Tagged magazines | Leave a reply

Fairy Tales, More Fairy Tales, a Mouse Skeleton, & Tomcat Murr: Castle of the Wolf

Updated on October 15, 2022 by Sandra Schwab

Last month I re-released Castle of the Wolf, a novel that was originally published back in 2007. It is a gothic romance — well, at least, it was planned as one, only then the lady with the sturdy boots turned up in the story and stomped all the gothicness to dust. Quite… eh… literally.

In the best gothic tradition, Castle isn’t set in England, but in southern Germany — in the Black Forest, to be exact, the place where I spent my primary school years and a place that is drenched in stories and covered with deep, dark woods. And quite a few castle (ruins).

The Kastelburg in Waldkirch. I spent my primary school years in this little town, & the town & castle were the inspiration for the main setting in Castle of the Wolf

Upon her father’s death, my heroine surprisingly inherits one such castle upon the condition that she marry the son of its former owner. Alas, that son turns out to be a super-grumpy dude, who does his very best to make Cissy leave the castle again. Enter rats, bats, a mouse skeleton (hey, it’s a gothic romance, there needs to be a skeleton, right?), and a bunch of very mysterious gargoyles. Oh, and there’s a very intriguing deck of (erotic transformation) cards too. In other words, my heroine has her work cut out for her if she wants to unravel the secrets of the castle.

One of the main themes of the novel is hinted at when Cissy is still in England and is packing her bags:

Cissy carefully wrapped one of her tea dresses around her copy of the Lyrical Ballads so the leather-bound volume would come to no harm in the travel chest during her journey. […]

“I cannot imagine what you want to do in Baden.” Wood creaked as her brother George shifted on the chair. “There is nothing for you there.”

There is nothing for me here. For a moment, Cissy had to close her eyes. Then she shook her head and busied herself with wrapping her book and putting it away. “I am going to have a castle.” Just imagine: a castle. Like a princess. She took up another tome.

“And marry a man you have never seen in your life.” Suddenly George sounded aggressive. “How our dear father could have come up with such a harebrained scheme is quite beyond me, I swear!”

Distracted, Cissy frowned and rubbed a thumb over a scratch in the blue leather cover of her book of German fairy tales, a present from her father for her nineteenth birthday. With her forefinger she traced the golden lettering: Kinder- und Hausmärchen gesammelt durch die Brüder Grimm.

Castle of the Wolf is a story about stories: it’s stuffed full of references to fairy tales, local legends, and to modern popular literature. While Cissy travels to the Black Forest by steamboat down the Rhine, she hears the grizly legend of the Mouse Tower of Bingen (evil bishop eaten up by mice), and later on Fenris, the grumpy hero, provides for a nice Austen / Bridget Jones moment: “For somebody called Fenris to strut around like a snarling demon wolf was just as ridiculous as, say, for somebody called Darcy to refuse to dance at an assembly.” I also couldn’t resist putting a German copy of Terry Pratchett’s Men at Arms (Helle Barden) into the castle library.

However, the most significant body of reference is formed by works of British and German Romanticism. I mean, when you have a grumpy hero and a completely exasperated heroine, you just have to reference Byron’s Byronic heroes, right? (Or rather, let the heroine reference them.) (She has never liked Byron’s Pirate and thinks Fenris’ sulking around the castle is a tad too melodramtic.) In addition, the German setting allowed me to refer to all my favorite German literary fairy tales, first and foremost Ludwig Tieck’s “Eckbert the Fair” (no happy ending, alas) with the enchanting song about woodsolitude sung by a magical bird:

Wooldsolitude,
Brings joy to me
Now and tomorrow
Forevermore,
What joy to me,
Woodsolitude.

In the course of Castle of the Wolf, Cissy also reads one of my favorite literary novels in German, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr. The first two volumes of the novel were published in 1819 and 20; Hoffmann died before he could begin working on the third volume. In a way, it is fitting the novel remained a fragment, for it is told in fragments: it is the autobiography of the (rather conceited) Tomcat Murr, who rips apart an older book to have paper to write on and as blotting paper. This older book is another biography, that of the bandmaster Kreisler, and at first it seems that these two stories don’t have anything to do with each other, but they become more and more intertwined. The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr was clearly a writing experiment for Hoffmann, a fun project where he created something very innovative and very intriguing.

So in other words, my own novel, Castle of the Wolf, is a declaration of love for stories and for reading and for seeing the world through the lens of fiction.

If you would like to accompany Cissy on her journey to the Black Forest, grab a copy of Castle at the following retailers:

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01IDD8K7U/
Apple: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/id1133885806
B&N: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/2940153356716
Kobo: http://store.kobobooks.com/Search/Query?fcmedia=Book&query=9783000400926

Happy reading!

Posted in Former Riskies, Regency, Writing | Tagged Black Forest, Gothic romance | Leave a reply