Hello! This is Laurie Bishop. Great cover, Cara!

I’ve been reading everyone else’s comments and trying to decide how I would qualify what makes a Regency risky. I find it isn’t as easy as I thought it would be. But since I have to come up with something 😉 , to me a risky Regency is one in which the heroine, and/or the hero, do something extraordinary for their sex/time/station—or must act in an unexpected way to address their dilemma. Also, in addition to this, they must do or be in this way without violating the attitudes of the time.Hence the trickiness.Let us say that I want my heroine to be courageous and able to take command to save the family estate. She might come to the traumatic conclusion that she must ruin herself by becoming the mistress of Snidely Whiplash; and she can acknowledge this by having all of the appropriate thoughts and feelings about what she feels forced to do. But…she will not use language that a gently reared young lady does not use, and she will otherwise behave with all the decorum within her power that she has been raised to use. And she will not know something that a gently reared young lady does not know.

Of course, if she is not a gently reared young lady, we have a different bucket of peas. She will have the perspective of a farmer’s daughter, a soldier’s daughter, or what have you. And that can be quite different. Even middle class daughters were different than the daughters of the highest peers. In PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, the Bennett daughters walked to town alone. Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s daughter would never been allowed to do such a thing.

In my first Regency, THE BEST LAID PLANS, the heroine was a very independent-thinking American heiress who was not raised in high English society. She was therefore allowed to be a little outrageous—and was a ball to write!

Laurie

WHEN HORSES FLY Oct. 2005
LORD RYBURN’S APPRENTICE Jan. 2006