Category: Regency

She Showed Me Regency England

Updated on January 27, 2014 by diane

Think back to 2003. I won in the Golden Heart contest, I sold my first book, The Mysterious Miss M, and I made the difficult decision to leave the day job and write full-time. I was floating on air.

Wellington Arch

Two weeks after I left the job, Amanda and I went on The Regency Tour of England, a tour designed and led by Washington Romance Writers member, Patty Suchy, whose avocation was to be Novel Explorations, specializing in travel that explored the written word.

Her Regency Tour was specially designed for Regency writers and readers. I was not an experienced traveler, so to have the tour designed for me was a dream come true.

We traveled to London, Bath, and Brighton and saw many places in between, like Lacock Village, a village that appeared unchanged from the Regency, and Salisbury Cathedral, where we saw a copy of the Magna Carta.

Amanda and Diane at Stratfield Saye

We visited Stratfield Saye, the country house of the Duke of Wellington, a visit that sparked my not-so-secret “love affair” with dear Artie (and my intense rivalry with Kristine Hughes over who he loves best). We visited Apsley House, his house in town. We visited so many great houses on that tour: Osterley, Wilton House, Syon Park, Bowood, Mompesson House. I examined furnishings up close and developed a particular interest in carpets. If I mention a carpet in my books, it comes from that tour.

Regency Room, Geffrye Museum

We also saw wonderful museums. The Geffrye Museum of domestic furnishings showed how furnishings changed through the ages. It showed a Regency drawing room. We visited Finchcock’s, a country house converted to a museum of musical instruments.

We visited Brighton, where I learned the beach does not have fine sand, but rather is pebbled. We walked through the Brighton Pavilion–photos don’t do it justice.

In Bath we had tea in the Pump Room with Mary Balogh, who just happened to be in Bath at the same time. She treated all of us. Later we dressed in Regency costume and danced with the Jane Austen Dancers in the same assembly rooms where Jane Austen danced.

Finchcock’s Museum

We walked through Mayfair and Tunbridge Wells and ate at the George Inn. We ate Sally Lun buns in Bath and visited Kew Gardens and rode a canal boat on the Regents Canal.

Diane at Apsley House

I’m sure I’ve left out something….Throughout this tour, Patty took care of everything, so all we had to do was look and experience and enjoy.

In 2005, Patty gave another tour, this time called the Romantic Road North. This tour focused on the era of coaching and the inns and sites along the Great North Road. After these two tours, Patty became more than a tour guide to me. She became a friend.

In September 2014, Patty and the ladies of Number One London blog have designed a Wellington tour, covering all the sites relating to the Duke of Wellington. I’m determined to attend.

But…Patty will not be with us, except in spirit. She lost her long battle with ovarian cancer two weeks ago, news that came as a shock, if not a surprise. I will miss her.

Diane and Patty on 2005 tour

Patty showed me the Regency in all its glorious detail and gave me memories I will forever cherish. I can never thank her enough for that. I hope she is looking down from heaven and realizing all the joy she’s given to so many.

Thank you, Patty!!

Posted in Regency, Research | 8 Replies

Deal ’em

Updated on January 11, 2014 by Myretta

Having nearly forgotten my day for blogging, I have turned once again to Hone’s The Every-Day Book. Quite a bit of January 11 is devoted to card-playing. Hone tells us that

This diversion resorted to at visitings during the twelve days of Christmas, as of ancient custom, continues without abatement during the prolongation of friendly meetings at this season. Persons who are opposed to this recreation from religious scruples, do not seem to distinguish between its use and abuse.

He goes on to say that Cards are not here introduced with a view of seducing parents to rear their sons as gamblers and blacklegs or their daughters to a life of scandal, an old age of cards, but to impress upon them the importance of not morosely refusing to participate in that the archdeacon refers to as of the ‘harmless mirth and innocent amusements of society.’

In Pride & Prejudice, Mrs. Philips’s evening party includes cards and even gambling. Mrs. Philips keeps a genteel, middle class home, so the gambling in this case probably did not involve money, but it was gambling nonetheless.

Gaming Fish

The fish Lydia is talking about refers to gaming tokens, frequently made of mother of pearl and not uncommonly used in card games.

Fortunately for us, some of these young men and women were seduced into being blacklegs and scandalous ladies. Where would our stories be without them? On the other hand, we’re equally entertained by the ‘harmless mirth and innocent amusements of society.’ It all depends on the plot.

Do you prefer the scandalous ladies and gambling gentleman or are you partial to those indulging in innocent amusement? Or perhaps both?

Posted in Frivolity, Jane Austen, Regency | 1 Reply

Twelfth Day

Updated on January 6, 2014 by diane

Today is Twelfth Day, the day after Twelfth Night and the traditional end to the Christmas festivities. Twelfth Day or the Epiphany marks the day the wise men arrived to present their gifts to the baby Jesus.

During the Regency, Twelfth Night, the eve of the Epiphany, would have been a time for parties and balls, for drinking wassail. One feature of such parties would be a cake into which a bean was baked. Whoever found the bean became the Lord of Misrule.

In preparation for Twelfth Night, the confectioners shops put on elaborate displays of Twelfth Night cakes, which could cost anywhere from several guineas to a few shillings. In Chambers Book of Days, he states: “We remember to have seen a huge Twelfth-cake in the form of a fortress, with sentinels and flags; the cake being so large as to fill two ovens in baking.”

Chambers also tells of another Twelfth Night tradition. In 1795, the will of comedian Robert Baddeley made a bequest of one hundred pounds to provide cake and punch each year to the performers at Drury Lane Theatre. It is a tradition that continues at the theatre today.

On Twelfth Day all Christmas decorations the traditional day to remove all your Christmas decorations. In Regency times all the greenery gathered to decorate the house would be taken down and burned. To leave decorations up after this date would be considered bad luck.

I took down and packed away all my decorations last Friday.

Have you taken your decorations down yet?

A Marriage of Notoriety is now available in ebook as well as paperback.

Posted in History, Regency | Tagged Twelfth Night | 4 Replies

Regency Gifts

Updated on December 23, 2013 by diane

It is too late for me to put anything on my Christmas list–Christmas is only two days away, yipes–but there is nothing to stop me from dreaming, is there?

So I might as well dream about receiving Regency gifts.

One item I would love to have is a Regency era nightgown. A reproduction of one, I mean. The nice thing is, I could probably get one of these someday. Here’s a particularly lovely one, from White Nightie.

I once had a nightgown something like this one. A college friend gave it to me. It had been her grandmother’s. I loved that nightgown and wore it for years until it wore out.

I’ve always wanted a piece of Regency era furniture. A pretty chest of drawers or something. This piece on ebay would do very nicely, I think. It would be lovely to furnish a home with such furniture, although I’d opt for modern beds and sofas. And electric lighting.

What Christmas list would be complete without jewelry? I’ve always wanted a genuine antique cameo. This one, also on ebay, is lovely.

What I should be doing, rather than dreaming of Regency gifts is wrapping some!

What do you wish for for Christmas this year? What do you have left to do?

Look on my website for the grand prize winner of the Harlequin Historical Authors Holiday Giveaway.

Posted in Frivolity, Regency | 2 Replies

My first Jane Austen

Updated on December 19, 2013 by susanna

I’m closing out Jane Austen’s birthday week by offering copies of the Cozy Classics board book editions of Pride and Prejudice and Emma, along with my novella A Dream Defiant in your choice of electronic format. Comment by 9 PM Pacific Standard Time on Sunday (that’s midnight Eastern) for a chance to win!

Emma image

I have a humiliating confession to make:

The first time I read Jane Austen, I got about a chapter in and then quit.

I was 14 or so, and I’d taken to reading my hometown library’s extensive collection of Georgette Heyer, Clare Darcy, and Marion Chesney. They were real, adult love stories I didn’t have to hide from my mom. Which wasn’t the case with historical romance in general. Anything with the lurid “bodice ripper” covers so prevalent in the 1980’s wasn’t quite forbidden to me, but they led to lectures on appropriate entertainment, the importance of waiting till marriage to have sex, etc. I occasionally snuck such books into the house regardless, but for the most part I just found ways to read what I liked that flew under Mom’s radar–e.g. you’d never guess how much sex is in the Earth’s Children series by the covers.

But I digress. Our librarian noticed me working my way through Heyer, Darcy, and Chesney and said I really MUST try this book called Pride and Prejudice.

So I checked it out, took it home, and tried to read it. But I couldn’t quite follow what was going on somehow, and the arch wit of the writing completely went over my earnest, angsty young head. So I gave up and set it aside.

I didn’t try Austen again until just after college, when I was 23 or 24. Again I started with Pride and Prejudice–and this time it instantly clicked. I plowed through all six of her novels one after the other, and I’ve re-read them more times than I can count in the years since.

P&P illustration

I’m still baffled and not a little embarrassed by my adolescent self’s failure to Get It. It’s not like I was a poor reader–I loved Jane Eyre, and I read Romeo and Juliet for fun at 12, albeit an annotated version with footnotes clarifying all the language and references I didn’t yet have the maturity and experience to pick up on my own. Maybe I would’ve done better with an annotated Austen to explain the entail, the relative social positions of the Bennetts, Darcys, and Bingleys, and everything else that baffled me then but made perfect sense a decade later.

Or maybe I just wasn’t for anything that wry and subtle. Those Regencies I was plowing through were by far the least angsty and dramatic fiction I was reading at the time, and even Heyer isn’t quite in the same league as Austen for subtlety, IMHO.

What about you? How old were you when you got your first taste of Austen, and did you immediately connect to her stories? Do you have a favorite book by any author that didn’t work the first time you read it?

Posted in Giveaways, Jane Austen, Reading, Regency | Tagged Susanna Fraser | 17 Replies