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Tag Archives: Susanna Fraser

In the Regency, but not wholly of the Regency

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Like Carolyn and Diane, I’ve been following with interest the discussion on the state of historical romances in general and Regencies in particular that’s been prominent on the romance blogosphere since Jane at Dear Author’s provocatively titled post, We Should Let the Historical Genre Die.

I’m never sure where I fit in during discussions of the State of the Regency, because I never can decide just how much of a Regency writer I am. Back when the Golden Heart and Ritas had two separate categories for Regencies and other historicals, I used to angst endlessly about where to enter my books. What if I entered them in Regency and got marked down for not having enough ballrooms and dukes? Or what if I entered them in historical, only to have some judge see the “1811” dateline at the top of the first chapter and think, “Hey! This is a Regency. I’m sick of Regencies. If I wanted to judge one, I would’ve signed up for that category.”

In the end, I entered The Sergeant’s Lady as a historical and its prequel, A Marriage of Inconvenience, as a Regency. Why? Well, The Sergeant’s Lady is set almost entirely in Spain during the Peninsular War with, as the title makes clear, a common sergeant as a hero. Despite its 1811-12 setting and British protagonists, it just doesn’t feel Regency. A Marriage of Inconvenience, on the other hand, is a house party story set in Gloucestershire, with a wealthy viscount for a hero and a poor relation cousin of a baronet for a heroine. Regency tropes everywhere you look.

My third book, An Infamous Marriage, is maybe a half-Regency. The hero and heroine are of the gentry rather than the nobility, and though they move in exalted circles in Brussels in the run-up to Waterloo because of the hero’s rank as a major-general, that’s not what their story is about. And my fourth book, A Dream Defiant, despite its 1813 setting is another non-Regency–it takes place in Spain in the aftermath of the Battle of Vittoria, the hero is a black soldier (the son of Virginian slaves who ran away to the British army and freedom during the American Revolution) and the heroine is another soldier’s widow, an ordinary village girl whose ambition in life is to take over her home village’s posting inn and make it famous for serving the best meals on the Great North Road.

I don’t want the Regency to die because I have such an insatiable passion for the opening 15 years or so of the 19th century. I mean, what would I do with all my research books if i couldn’t base my novels upon their contents?

Susanna's Shelf

But when I write my Regencies (or Regencies in year only, as the case may be), I’m trying my best to ground them in a specific place and time–and that’s what I’d like to see more of in the genre as a whole. I know a lot of writers and readers love historicals for the “Once Upon a Time” feeling, and the last thing I want to do is deny anyone the pleasure of the stories they like best. But for myself I don’t want once upon a time. I want 1812 at the Battle of Salamanca, or Seattle in the 1850’s, or Philadelphia in 1776. And I don’t want the only alternatives to Regency to be Victorian, Western, and Medieval. I want Colonial American historicals. I want more stories set on the West Coast, like Bonnie Dee’s lovely Captive Bride. I want a Civil War romance from the Union side. Given the role of women at the time it’d be tricky to pull off, but I’d love to see an ancient Greek romance set sometime around the Greco-Persian wars. And so many more. I want more history–in my Regencies and across the genre.

What about you? What unexplored corners of the Regency world would you like to see more of? And what other periods of history strike your fancy?

Posted in Reading, Regency, Risky Regencies, Writing | Tagged , | 22 Replies

Considering Culinary History

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Susanna here, rejoicing that it’s Friday at last. I’m hard-pressed to think when I’ve been more eager to see a week come to its end.

I’m currently reading Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat, by Bee Wilson. It’s a fascinating look at the history not of food, but of the implements we use to cook and eat it. I’m only about a third of the way through, but I’ve already learned so much. For example, 19th century vegetables weren’t anywhere near as overcooked as you’d expect based on the long cooking times advised in early cookbooks, because cooks were advised to simmer vegetables rather than cook them at a fast boil, and also because they’d pack a lot of vegetables into a small saucepan rather than a smaller amount in a larger pot like we do today.

Consider the Fork

And here’s another fact that surprised me tremendously: You know how most people have a natural overbite, and if you don’t, your orthodontist will work to give you one? Apparently that’s a recent development in human history, and isn’t the result of a genetic change–it’s developmental, based on how we eat. When you look at older skeletons, you generally see incisors that meet edge-to-edge. The overbite starts to emerge 200-250 years ago in Europe, but 800 to 1000 years earlier in China. In both cases, the change happened first among the upper classes.

The probable explanation? Forks and chopsticks. Once people started carrying food to their mouths already bite-sized rather than tearing it apart with their teeth, their incisors started to grow in differently.

I’ve long been fascinated by culinary history, and I’m starting to incorporate it in my writing. In my July release, A Dream Defiant, my heroine is a naturally gifted cook. She’s a commoner, an ordinary English village girl following the drum in Spain with her soldier husband, and her dream for after the war ends is to take over the inn in her home village, which has a reputation for dreadful food, and turn it into a place all the travelers on the Great North Road will stop to linger over their dinners. And I have an unfinished manuscript I’m thinking of dusting off where one of the characters is a French chef I created to contrast with every fussy, melodramatic French chef ever written. The manuscript in question is a paranormal, so if you picture Anthony Bourdain, Vampire Hunter, armed with garlic and cleaver, you wouldn’t be far off.

What delicious things are you hoping to taste this weekend? I’m planning to bake cookies for the first time in ages.

Posted in Research, Writing | Tagged , , | 8 Replies

When families give advice

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“Mom?” asked Miss Fraser, age 8. “How’s the writing going?”

“Pretty good,” I replied. “Rose had some ideas for putting more conflict in my Christmas novella, so I’m working on fitting those into the story.”

“What do you mean, conflict?”

“You know–all the bad things and problems that make a book interesting, that the characters have to work through to get to the happy ending.”

“Oh.” She frowned thoughtfully. “I have a good idea. You could put an earthquake in the story.”

“Well, that would be exciting, only the story is set in England, and they almost never have earthquakes there.”

Miss Fraser shrugged and gave me a look that said, Do I have to do EVERYTHING for you? “Then put in something they DO have.”

I then tried to explain about internal conflict and all the baggage my hero and heroine have left over from when they last met five years before, but her eyes started to glaze over. Miss Fraser thinks my stories sadly lacking in wizards, Greek gods, and clans of warrior cats going on quests.

Snowy England

A few days later I got into a conversation with my husband about how sometimes problems are easier to solve than you think. I had a character in my aforementioned Christmas novella whose existence was critical to my other characters’ lives, so I couldn’t just write him out altogether. But he had nothing interesting to do within the few days of my plot, and having him around was pulling focus off the characters who DID matter.

At first I was stumped, but then I came up with a simple solution: I changed my atmospheric Christmas Eve snow flurries to a wind-driven storm that accumulated thickly, and I made my extraneous character’s wife heavily pregnant instead of halfway through her second trimester. Voila! Now Harry the Necessary but Uninteresting wouldn’t dare venture on the roads and risk having his firstborn delivered in a carriage mired in a snowdrift, and all was right with my fictional world.

Mr. Fraser wasn’t so easily satisfied. “What are you going to do when some reader comes after you with an almanac proving it didn’t snow that Christmas Eve?”

I shrugged.

“You don’t CARE, do you?” he asked, eyebrows climbing in indignation. (I should note here that Mr. Fraser is a bit of a weather geek. As a child his dream career was meteorologist.)

“Look, I’m all about historical accuracy–to a point. I wouldn’t write Waterloo without the big rainstorm the day before, since it had a huge impact on the outcome of the battle, or forget that 1816 was the Year Without a Summer. But looking up the exact weather of every single day is several levels of obsessiveness beyond where I’m willing to go. Besides, this is a CHRISTMAS STORY. A white Christmas is a TROPE. It snows in England NOW. No one is going to have trouble believing in a Christmas snowstorm in 1810–especially given that the more of a weather geek they are, the more likely they are to know about the Little Ice Age and how much colder it was back then.”

“But what if 1810-11 was the warmest winter on record? What if it’s the year everyone talked about the daffodils blooming in January and all the young rakehells swimming naked in the Thames on Christmas morning?”

“Hmph. Unlikely.”

“Hmph. Where is your story set, exactly?”

“Kent.”

Mr. Fraser opened a new browser tab for Google and searched for weather in Kent in 1810. When nothing much came up, he searched on London and found a bit of data, but nothing that specifically remarked on Christmas. Peering over his shoulder, I spotted a reference to the Thames freezing over in January 1811. “Ha!” said I. “I stand by my story.”

“But what if it was a sudden cold snap?”

“I don’t CARE. A white Christmas is a TROPE.”

I hope you’ve enjoyed this glimpse of living a writer’s life in House Fraser. Does your family give you helpful advice whether you ask for it or not? And where do you draw the line between accuracy and obsessiveness?

Posted in Frivolity, Research, Writing | Tagged , , | 4 Replies

Unexpected Connections

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As I mentioned in my last post here, I’m working on a road romance that opens in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of New Orleans. Since my heroine is a third or fourth generation New Orleans native, I’ve been reading up on the early history of the city to get a feel for her world and how it shaped her.

By sheer luck I stumbled across a book called The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans, by Lawrence N. Powell. It covers the history of the city from its founding through the Battle of New Orleans, and it’s full of lovely footnotes I’m mining for more detailed sources of what life was like when the Crescent City looked something like this:

New Orleans 1803

To my vast surprise, I discovered that the demography and culture of 19th century New Orleans were impacted, and significantly so, by a part of history I know much better–the Peninsular War. You see, much of the Francophone population of 19th century New Orleans did not in fact descend from the original settlers, but from refugees from the Haitian Revolution in 1804. At first the refugees went to Cuba and were accepted there, since France and Spain were then allies. But when Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808 and put his brother Joseph on the throne, the French were no longer welcome in a Spanish possession like Cuba…so they fled to New Orleans, which had been in neutral American hands since 1803.

Who knows what other unexpected connections I’ll discover as I continue to explore New Orleans, the Natchez Trace, and the rest of 1815 America? Right now I’m just hoping to find a Louisiana cookbook from sometime close to my time period, so I’ll know what foods to make my heroine homesick for!

Posted in Research, Writing | Tagged , | 14 Replies

These are the voyages of the Steamboat Enterprise…

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One of my current projects is an as-yet-uncontracted historical romance set mostly in America in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of New Orleans. And the first thing I realized as I developed the idea was just how little I know about my own country’s early 19th century history. What I do know is patchy. I learned a good bit about the War of 1812 researching my 2012 book, An Infamous Marriage, but my focus was on the war in and around Canada. Partly because of that research, I know Tecumseh, but he died in battle before this story started. I’ve learned about Cherokee history and the Trail of Tears–my husband’s family is Oklahoma Cherokee–but that doesn’t directly touch this story, either.

So I’m now in all-out research mode. Since I’m writing a road romance, I can’t just learn New Orleans. I have to learn about everywhere my hero and heroine would pass through on their way to safety–including what transportation methods and routes actually existed back then in what was still largely frontier country. When I mentioned this to my husband, who’s far more up on the history of technology than I am, the first thing he said was, “Steamboats.”

Now, when I hear “steamboat,” I picture something like the musical Show Boat, or maybe Mark Twain or the Civil War. (Told you the history of technology is one of my weak points!) But because I trust my husband’s instincts, I immediately started looking into it…and discovered that 1815 was just at the dawn of steam travel on the Mississippi. When my story opens, the Enterprise was in New Orleans.

Enterprise

She’d come all the way downriver from Pennsylvania, bringing much-needed supplies for Andrew Jackson’s army. During the rest of the winter and early spring, she mostly shuttled between New Orleans and Natchez. Later in the year she earned fame by sailing all the way upriver (up rivers, plural) to her Pennsylvania home port. Though the journey took many months, it was a portent of the future. Before steamboats, travel upriver on the Mississippi was impractical–rivermen would float down on flatboats, barges, or canoes, then abandon their boats and walk or ride overland to their homes in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, or other points north.

Once I found out there was a steamboat–and one named Enterprise!–I had to set my hero and heroine aboard her. They’ll get off at Natchez, though, and take the Natchez Trace…which is a story for a future blog.

Have you ever stumbled across a piece of history that wasn’t what you expected it to be? And do you have any historica blind spots like mine for technology?

Posted in Research, Writing | Tagged , , , | 9 Replies