Back to Top

Tag Archives: Pam Rosenthal

I’m blessed with ample reading opportunities on my commute and in the bathtub, and like Diane I also like to read before I go to sleep. So it’s quite common for me to have a book on the metro and a book (or two) at home. You’d think I would have a lot more books to talk about than I actually do. I had to go and look at my account on Goodreads to see what I’ve read this year as well as the ones knocking around in my head.

I don’t read a lot of romance for various reasons, but I have to mention a couple: Pam Rosenthal’s wonderful, inventive, subtle, sexy The Edge of Impropriety, a book for and about grown-ups, and not just because of the sex. Honest. Also Julie Ann Long’s terrific The Perils of Pleasure, with its elegant prose and complex characters, though to be honest I’m not sure what it was about, but heck, I had a good time with it.

I also have been re-reading Heyer after an absence of, uh, several decades. I talked about Regency Buck a couple of weeks ago. I also read Cousin Kate–meh, zzzz, Gothically silly; Frederica–this must be the book which began the tradition in romance of adorable children and rumbunctious cute dogs, or the other way round if you prefer; The Nonesuch–sorry, all I could think of was Where’s Waldo, but it had a terrific spoiled bimbo anti-heroine; Devil’s Cub–loved it up to where Mary shot him and then was appalled that she turned into his mom (but obviously, with a cross-dressing loony as his real mother, what else would we expect?); A Woman of Quality–interesting because it was one of her later books with a heroine who was bored and grumpy, but no discernible plot; and Bath Tangle, which I gave up on after finding the hundreds of characters Heyer tends to throw at you in the first few chapters interchangeable, although I’m sure I would have noticed Mr. Spock, as the cover suggests.

I read the newest release by one of my very favorite authors, Jude Morgan (he’s a guy!), Symphony, about the love affair between actress Harriet Smithson and Hector Berlioz, with whom he fell in love when he saw her in her signature role as Ophelia (in English) in Paris. She inspired him–I guess that’s the right word, maybe it should be tormented him–to write the Symphonie Fantastique.

I discovered a new Irish writer called Tana French who writes modern Irish police procedurals; gorgeous, stylish, thought-provoking stuff. I lay on the sofa the day after Christmas and read her first book, In The Woods, and did nothing else all day. Blissful. I’d read her second, The Likeness, a few weeks before (I tend to read things out of sequence).

Early last year I had the interesting experience of reading, one after the other, two books on the same theme, modern retellings of the Orpheus legend–Gods Behaving Badly, the first novel by a smart, funny young English writer, Marie Phillips; and the beautiful, painful, eloquent Orpheus Lost by Janette Turner Hospital.

One book that was a major disappointment, but that translated into a wonderful movie, was The Jane Austen Bookclub (how about this one, Cara?). The writer(s) of the screenplay wisely took the author’s copious telling and translated it into dialogue between the characters. A pity–this was a book I wanted to love.

As for nonfiction, I enjoyed Sultry Climes, a book about the Grand Tour, or the STD Tour, as it should really be known. Those enthusiastic young men often brought back more than a few pieces of statuary from their educational travels. I also found a new book about servants, Master and Servant by Caroline Steedman, a thought-provoking interpretation of master-servant relationships in the late 18th-century, based on the case of an elderly clergyman whose female servant became pregnant (it wasn’t his child), and instead of righteously dismissing her, he kept her and the child in the house, doted on them, and provided for them both in his will.

I also discovered A Picture History of the Grenville Family of Rosedale House, a collection of watercolors by a young girl named Mary Yelloly, painted in the 1820s when she was between eight and twelve years of age. She only lived to be twenty-one, which gives a sweet poignancy to her pictures. The paintings were discovered and published only recently. You can read about the book here, and this is one of the paintings.

And here’s something I hope you’ll read and enjoy–I’m doing revisions for it at the moment–coming in May, my next book, A Most Lamentable Comedy, available from amazon.co.uk, and although it’s not listed there yet, this UK site, The Book Depository, offers free shipping worldwide.

What are you reading? Plan to read? What books did you enjoy recently?

Playing with women’s fantasies is a delightful pastime for Rosenthal, who’s always looking for new ways to burn up the pages and keep your mind focused on characters and plot, not just her wonderfully erotic love scenes….an exhilarating adventure filled with untamed passion, intrigue and wild escapades in and out of bed. FOUR STARS — Kathe Robin, Romantic Times

… supremely sensual, wickedly witty, and one of the… best to date [by an author] noted for exquisitely written, intelligent romances that often hover near the erotic edges of the genre… – Kristin Ramsdell, Library Journal

Today we welcome back to the Riskies Pam Rosenthal, who’s here to talk about her new book, The Edge of Impropriety. Your comment or question enter you into a contest for a signed copy of the book, so ask away.

RR: You call The Edge of Impropriety a novel of eros, esthetics, and empire–why? And what inspired it?

PR: Well, the eros part is easy; I always write about sex and desire. But this time I got interested in the classical roots of these concepts, through a fascinating anthology called Erotikon: Essays of Eros, Ancient and Modern, and especially a poem within it, also called Erotikon, by Susan Mitchell. The poem’s about Cupid and Psyche, about the meeting of the human and the divine, and one of its long, prosy lines says:

…there aren’t enough tenses for all this to happen in, the past and the present fragmenting as they bop off one another…

Which is exactly what I believe: that sex doesn’t happen all in the same tense. There’s anticipation and retrospection; a sharpening, a blurring — even perhaps a blanking — of focus, and who knows in what order? Before, after, and during bop off each other (as Mitchell’s word) as though (in my words) in a hot pinball game.

Which is why I find rendering sex in language such a maddening, fun challenge, not to speak of a turnon — for me and hopefully for my readers.

Though here perhaps I might be frightening the horses. So back to the art and culture of the ancient world, the Greek and Roman empires…

…about which I knew shamefully little when I started, necessitating a lot of reading and thinking (my husband and I both audited some college classics courses). And I also thought a lot about our Regency period, with its neo-Classical styles, fashionable ladies women in their pale muslins and aristocratic gentlemen with their large, imposing classical educations, confident in their shared self-image as heirs to the ancient empires. This was, after all, the period when Lord Elgin pried the marbles off the Parthenon and shipped them home to Britain.

Ancient art in the service of rising empire; sex and power, elegance and erudition. I’d recently seen the Elgin Marbles for the first time, and the image that pulled it all together for me was of a scholarly gentleman and an elegant lady exchanging their first heated glances among all those beautiful blank white marble stares.

And the image remained with me into the book itself: Marina and Jasper meet cute among the marbles, in the British Museum.

RR: Your hero, Jasper Hedges, is one of those classically educated gentlemen you don’t entirely approve of. But your heroine is also pretty brainy.

PR: Yes, well, Marina Wyatt’s a writer of Society novels, called silver-fork novels at the time, these were witty, wordy, awfully popular fantasies of life among the haut ton, packaged for the eager consumption of the rising commercial and industrial middle classes, who couldn’t get into Almack’s except by reading about it. Really, these were the first Regency novels, written during the Regency itself — I find that whole self-reflexive thing, not to speak of the class comedy, quite fascinating.

And in fact, Marina’s life story is a highly romanticized version of the life of Margaret, Countess of Blessington, the lady in the painting on the cover of my previous book, The Slightest Provocation. Margaret was a popular novelist and the widow of an earl. And she also gave literary parties, had a scandalous relationship with a famous young dandy and a nasty, hushed-up, early life in Ireland. But in EDGE I mix up all the details and give her a happy ending (not the young dandy, I should add, though he also appears in the book, highly transformed as well).

RR: Is Jasper also based on a historical figure?

PR: No, not really. I patterned his upper-class prejudices (he initially resists taking money for writing) after Lord Byron; his opposition to the looting of Mediterranean art treasures also after Byron; his extensive Cambridge classical education after, of all people, the Reverend Patrick Bronte (father of Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and Branwell); his intellect after any number of guys I’ve been attracted to, including my own husband; and his love for his niece on my husband’s fantastic fathering skills. While as for his looks (a younger, hotter version of his looks, anyway), I drew inspiration, you might say, from this photo of Daniel Craig from the movie of The Golden Compass, especially the stance, the posture. All-in-all, I think that dreaming up Jasper Hedges might have been the most fun I’ve ever had creating a romantic hero, and I was gratified that one of the reviewers from DearAuthor.com — who gave EDGE an A! — called Jasper her favorite of my heroes. Pretty cool given that he’s 47 and sometimes feels his age. Oh, and he also owes a lot to Risky writer Janet Mullany’s Adam Ashworth in Dedication, so thanks are in order to Janet.

RR: Quite early on in the book Marina and Jasper have an understanding that their relationship will be only sexual, but emotional factors come into play, and so do Jasper’s family problems. Was this a hard sell, to have a hero who is guardian to an adolescent niece and deeply concerned with his family responsibilities?

PR: Not exactly a hard sell — because to be honest, I was already contracted and my editor wanted me to move along, given the glacial pace at which I work. But she also was rightfully and consistently concerned about how I was going to put an early adolescent into a book that had lots of hot sex. And in fact I gave the issue a lot of thought — as does Jasper, who makes it a point of honor never to stay the night with Marina, so he can always have breakfast with Sydney, the niece. Marina’s besotted lover, he observes rather grimly to himself, and Sydney’s quaint, straitlaced guardian might inhabit the same body, but they had very little to say to each other.

And yet part of the reason Marina falls in love with Jasper is because of his devotion to Sydney. But what are the prospects for romance when each lover lives a life divided from itself? Or (as Marina puts it) into neat little compartments….Like those trays of insects and bits of bone and mineral in the British Museum.

In many ways these issues constitute the real questions and conflicts of The Edge of Impropriety. When you write a romance about young lovers, you can make them relatively free from responsibility and tantalizingly open to risk, experience, and transformation. But here I wanted to write about lovers who were tangled up in experience, in the pulls and stresses of memory and obligation — I worked hard to find physical metaphors for the way that life weaves us into its ongoing patterns. Marina and Jasper have been shaped and hurt by their separate lives and need to find their way home together. With a little help… but that would be giving things away.

RR: What’s next?

PR: Fan fiction. 😉 Well, sort of: I call it that to keep myself from getting too self-important. I’m at a very early stage right now, but my idea is to retell two classic English novels from the point of view of certain minor female characters I think the author gave the shaft to in the originals. I tell the “real” stories, of course, in a pair of sexy novellas. And no, I’m not telling which classic English novels.

Thanks so much for having me, Riskies.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 32 Replies

Elk: The Theory by A. Elk brackets Miss brackets. My theory is along the following lines.

Host: Oh God.

Elk: All brontosauruses are thin at one end, much MUCH thicker in the middle, and then thin again at the far end. That is the theory that I have and which is mine, and what it is too.

Monty Python, The Dinosaur Sketch

So my theory is…

It wasn’t bare arms, bosoms, or ankles, it was the bared nape of the neck that defines Regency gowns.

(Although with the lady at the right, you get the best of all worlds.)

Have you ever noticed how so many fashion prints show women with their necks crooked or bent, even if they’re covered by the brim of a hat or a ruff? Men, for the most part, were paying for ladies’ gowns, and while they might appreciate the bared skin, they might not want wives, daughters, mistresses to assume that just because they were dressed as a goddess, that they might assume immortals’ free behavior.

Women might not have to appear in public any more with heads and shoulders decently covered, but submissiveness was expected (unless they were extremely well-born and/or mad, bad, and dangerous to know).

I think there’s a great comparison here with the geisha’s kimono, cut to expose what in Japanese culture is a potent erotic zone–yes, the nape of the neck.

I have to admit I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot as I’ve been reading Pam Rosenthal‘s wonderful The Edge of Impropriety, in which clothes, and the massive changes in fashion of the first two decades of the nineteenth century, play a supporting role. Pam will be here as our Riskies guest this Sunday, November 16, to talk about the book and give away a signed copy.

And today I’m over at the Hoydens, talking about dumb luck in a box. Come and visit!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 6 Replies


I am closing in on the first draft of my Regency-set historical (65,000+ words, Amanda, for next time you crack that Hello Kitty whip and ask how it’s going!), and find that my hero and heroine are having a lot more sexual encounters than I’d originally anticipated.

Which is good for the ultimate sellability of my book, and it’s nowhere near as hot as some of the hottest historicals out there (never mind the erotic romance), but it does beg the question, how much is too much? By pushing the envelope one way, or we backing people into a corner another way?


For example, do you remember the hoopla when Lisa Valdez‘s Passion came out? I thought it was a fantastic book, but some people thought it crossed over the invisible appropriate erotic line. But in that book, the hero and heroine only had sex with each other, and it was all fairly vanilla, if quite frequent and usually public.

One way for authors to avoid being tagged “erotic,” and therefore not put into a further genre is to go the fantasy route; if your hero or heroine is otherworldly, of another species, you can have them do all sorts of things: Demons, angels, seals that turn into humans (are those selkies?), werewolves, ghosts, and yes, trees all get busy.

Jane Lockwood had a post about the evolution of erotic romance at the Spiced Tea Party yesterday; she says she and her fellow erotic writers are concerned erotic romance “was losing its romantic side, and, worse yet, wasn’t even story telling; that it was becoming formulaic and more like porn . . that there wasn’t enough emphasis on plot and characterization, the nuts and bolts of storytelling.”

I have read Jane’s book, and Pam Rosenthal‘s books, and Colette Gale‘s, and they are frankly sexual, but yes, have a plot. And although I would argue Pam’s books are, there is no way Jane or Colette’s could be called “historical romance” (despite what the marketers of Jane’s book say), but they are definitely not straight porn.


In some ways, I’d say books written by Jane, Pam and Colleen are suffering the same kind of fate traditional Regencies did a few years ago: With historical romances getting hotter and hotter, erotic authors are moving further and further into previously uncharted territories, leaving erotic plot-driven books stuck uncomfortably in the middle between hot historical and straight erotic.

I would argue, of course, that labeling books is silly; I liked Elena‘s suggestion awhile back of rating the hotness factor, the way All About Romance does, and leaving the categories alone.

What do you think? How much sex is too much in a historical romance? Do you read erotica as well as historical romance? Would you want your books labeled for their hotness factor?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 19 Replies