Author Archives: carolyn

About carolyn

Carolyn Jewel was born on a moonless night. That darkness was seared into her soul and she became an award winning and USA Today bestselling author of historical and paranormal romance. She has a very dusty car and a Master’s degree in English that proves useful at the oddest times. An avid fan of fine chocolate, finer heroines, Bollywood films, and heroism in all forms, she has two cats and a dog. Also a son. One of the cats is his.

The Lustful Turk : A Review (possibily NSFW but no pictures)

Updated on March 16, 2011 by carolyn

Regency Era Smut

You may recall that last week I mentioned a Regency-era tale called The Lustful Turk. I suppose it’s erotica. I had high hopes for this book going in. After all, it’s Regency-era smexiness. What could be better except maybe pictures, which the print version has?

On the whole I would rather troll Shakepeare for dirty puns. (I’ll be right over, Amanda.)

In Preview This Book on Amazon, the pictures looked nice and clear. In the book? Not so much. I could tell the subject matter was racy, but in the print book, the pictures were too small and pixelated. What a disappointment, because there was some artistic merit in them.

The Text of The Turk

The text wasn’t a disappointment, but not in a good way. Early attempts to tell extremely racy stories (de Sade excluded since he could at least write his way out of a paper bag) were predictably bad since 1) the desire to write hot doesn’t necessarily coincide with a talent for such and 2) there was a fairly universal lack of elements we today consider necessary to an entertaining story. Things like plot, character development and something– some nugget of something– that readers can care about.

I don’t know for sure if this is something peculiar to men writing about sex but for pre-20th century raciness, the lack of story elements is the norm. More on that in a bit. Although, I’m pleased to say that this book did have a discernible plot. I’m not saying it’s a good one, but stuff happens!

Great Lines in Literature

However, plot points aside, The Lustful Turk is notable for what I consider one of the greatest lines of literature ever written:

“Seize the virgin!” repeated Ozman, ‘she will be only too honored and happy to escape the pollution of this blaspheming wine bibber.’

Imagine this Regency buck sitting at his club with pen and paper and writing his magnum opus between drinks and bad jokes. What should Ozman say, he probably wondered at this point. He wants his heroine to get kidnapped at her wedding and then nailed by the Lustful Turk, who is not Ozman, by the way. Yes, it’s quite a turning point and full of conflict. Will someone pop her cherry before the Turk gets his chance? Our erstwhile author is at least attempting to create tension. He has another drink and inspiration swells!

Rest assured, the Turk gets his virgin. Several of them actually.

In Which Carolyn Sighs. Many times.

The women are all horrified at being raped until the Turk convinces them they like it, and then hey! Turk-y baby I love you because you can get that big engine ready on a moment’s notice all night every night.

I was not convinced, I’m afraid.

It was authorial wishful thinking with a big dose of stupid ideas that need to die a horrible death. It’s a distasteful trope that lasted well into the 1980’s when Feminists saved all our asses by pointing out how absurd, destructive, hateful and just plain wrong it is to think a man can rape a woman and she’ll eventually like it. It’s pervasive in too much literature and lingers still.

In fact, you can probably yourself think of several literary books that include such false and damaging notions. And, of course, early Romances aren’t sometimes called Rapetastic for nothing. But, then, these women didn’t have a better example. That they often turned that trope on its head is something to celebrate as we also celebrate having moved past that in Romance.

There are all kinds of slurs, cliches and stereotypes. Everywhere you look. Religion? Yup. (An abbott demands sex in return for saving a womans’ life, otherwise, he leaves her to die) People who aren’t white? You betcha! (the whole damn book) The lower classes? But of course! (The heroine’s beautiful servant is badly beaten but the heroine? She is too white and tender and upper class.)

While the distasteful representation of female sexual agency is front and center there’s plenty more in the background. (Dear Anonymous Author: Worried much about women?) I get that he didn’t know any better, but did it have to take us 200 years before we did?

Meanwhile, Back in the Harem

Anyway, the story is told in epistolary fashion, with all the extreme awkwardness of that device that you could possibly imagine. No, imagine more. More. More….. Yes!

Now you’re close.

So more virgins get kidnapped and deflowered and the Turk is indeed very lustful. But he is also a nice guy. Because his very last conquest cuts off his penis and he is totally cool with that! He sends all his ex-virgin white girls home to their loving families. To be fair, one of them is Greek or something.

There is also sequel bait in the form of the heroine’s baby. She’s knocked up at one point, and I think we never find out what happened to the baby. Or maybe we do. But I’m NOT reading through that again to find out.

Byron

Any connection with Byron is quite a stretch. He may be inextricably linked now with the revolution in Greece, but he’s not the only Englishman to go there or be aware of the politics of the revolution. Mentioning Greece in no way connects this book with Byron except for the modern reader who only knows, yeah, Byron — he went to Greece. I doubt very much the author was thinking of Bryon. He was thinking about whether the Turk should deflower another virgin.

Thoughts? Reactions? Opinions? Share in the comments.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Regency smut, RT Book Reviews, sex, The Lustful Turk | 11 Replies

Getting Down and Dirty with the Nineteenth Century

Updated on March 9, 2011 by carolyn

A History of Erotic Literature by Patrick J. Kearney, MacMillan London, 1982.

A few interesting tidbits from this book (fyi, my combination of quotes and summary are in blockquotes here to distinguish from my general commentary.)

Between 1800 and 1850, Louis Perceau’s Bibliographie du roman erotique
lists 26 “separate and orignal works” whereas in the period 1851-1900 there are “almost seven times that number.”

In the early years of the 19th century there were a number of successful prosecutions for “obscene libel.”

My personal suspicion is that the Victorians were working so hard at NO SEX ever that the pressure was too much for some people and it came out in erotic writing — which if you have ever read Victorian erotica, oh lord. So repetitive and boring because there is little-to-no emotion. Did Regency folks write less of it because they were less repressed? Or were the prosecutions for “obscene libel” a deterrent? Or were people then still writing for private audiences and those MSS were never actually published, just handed around among friends?

George Cannon published erotica from 1815 to 1864. After his death, his wife continued the business until her death some 10 years later. In 1830, he was jailed for six months and fined 100 pounds for a volume of deSade’s Juliette.

The Lustful Turk, by J.B. Brookes was published in 1828 and “tells in a series of letters from Emily Barlow to Silvia Carey what befalls the former who, while en route to India, in captured by Moorish pirates and given to their captain, an “English renegade” as a gift to the Dey of Algiers.” There are some monks engaging in white slavery on the side. Sex happens etc.

Then Kearney goes on to say:

But the specific influence in The Lustful Turk is Byron. This is apparent from the first, when Emily is captured by that most powerful Byronic image, the ‘English renegade’ corsair. And later, in the sub-narratives that recount the lives of Honoria Grimaldi and Adianti, two of the other girls in the Dey’s harem, there are strong Byronic elements, particularly in Adianti’s story which in part concerns the excesses of the Turks during their occupation of Greece.

Apparently, The Lustful Turk is one of the most frequently reprinted erotic novels in English. Wikipedia on this book. It’s available on Amazon in print for a little over $10 or on Kindle for $0.99. Kindle it is. As I discovered just seconds ago, the first letter in this story is dated 1815 so I really have to read it.

And now, because Amazon lets you Search Inside The Book (O_O) I’ve discovered the reason for the price discrepancy between the print version and the Kindle version. The print version has pictures. And not crappy ones. So I have ordered the print version, too.

Should I report back next week or is that enough smut?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Erotica, smut, The Lustful Turk | 5 Replies

Amazing Photos of Regency Gowns

Updated on March 2, 2011 by carolyn

Alas, I can only provide you with a link since I don’t have time to actually steal the content.

As was the custom of late Victorian and Edwardian genre painters, Talbot Hughes had amassed an extensive collection of historical costumes and accessories as studio props dating from the 16th century through the 1870s. The collection was donated to the Victoria and Albert Museum after it had been exhibited at Harrods department store in 1913. Samples of Hughes’s costume collection remain on public view at the V&A to this day in the British Galleries
– Wikipedia

Basically, in 1913, a bunch of folks put on these gowns and they took pictures of them. Scroll down a bit to reach the Regency gowns.

Go here to see the photos.

And, just because I’m nice, here’s the Wikipedia entry for the Victoria and Albert museum, which is a pretty huge time suck. You’re welcome. You should be glad I’m not linking to the V&A because then you’d NEVER get free. Oh wait, I’m not that nice. Victoria&Albert Museum.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Clothes, Victoria and Albertt Museum | 11 Replies

Connections

Updated on February 23, 2011 by carolyn

OK, let’s see if I can pull off this post. If not, I blame it on whatever little beastie went after Amanda’s computer. My intention is to bring this around to the Regency era. (waving of hands.)

Country Living

I live in the country, and the other day, I tweeted the picture you see here. (Blogger isn’t letting me add images right now so I’m off to fetch the embed code from my flickr account . . . BRB)

OK! I took that picture from the deck of my house this past weekend. What I was thinking at the time was that there was SNOW on the mountains. SNOW! Around here, we call them the Sonoma Mountains, even though everyone knows they’re really just hills. The snow level has to be down to 1500-2000 feet for there to be snow on the Sonoma Mountains.

I tweeted the picture thinking everyone would be all, OMG, that’s SNOW on the Sonoma Mountains and that one or two people who live where there is actual weather would tell me to grow a pair. (Hey, I stood on the deck in my jammies and slippers and took that picture! It was kind of cold. Sort of.) I just looked up the elevation of my town. It’s 12-400 feet. That morning, the house was about 30 minutes and 1500 feet of elevation from SNOW and 30 minutes and let’s say 12-400 feet of elevation from the Pacific Ocean.

Instead of the comments I expected, many people on twitter said they wanted to move in with me. Because, as I had actually forgotten in my excitement over SNOW!! on the Sonoma Mountains, our house has a spectacular view. In fact, most of that side of the house is sliding glass doors that look onto variations of that view. Mostly without snow, I should add.

Which Got Me To Thinking

If you live in a city, it’s easy to get divorced from nature. In the US, most of us aren’t getting our food from a garden or the farm, or the neighbor’s farm. We get eggs from the store, not chickens. Our meat comes from the meat department, not from the butchered pig we raised.

When we eat a delicious melon, we don’t save the seeds so we can plant them and eat the same melon again next year.

When we go outside at night, we can’t see the stars and for many of us, we can barely see the moon.

We have declining variety in our food because we stopped saving seeds to plant.

A few stories

We have chickens at our house, and my son has grown up on fresh eggs from chickens that roam around during the day eating what comes naturally to chickens. Eggs from chickens like this taste different. They look different — the yolks are an intense golden-yellow-orange. They behave differently in recipes.

Then a coyote ate the chickens — during the day! and we had to buy store bought eggs while we waited for the weather to warm up enough for us to buy new chicks, and then for the chicks to turn into hens and then for the eggs to get past the tiny pullet stage . . .

The first time my son saw scrambled eggs from store bought eggs, he wanted to know what was wrong with them. Because they were anemic looking. They were pale, pale, yellow instead of a strong yellow. They didn’t taste all that great either. Compared to real eggs.

Fresh vegetables from a garden are kind of the same experience.

Not Lambchops!

When I was a kid, my folks had one of our lambs slaughtered and my mom fed us lamb chops shortly thereafter. We all sat there, in silence, staring at our plates. No one moved to so much as pick up a fork. We were all thinking how we’d watched that lamb gamboling in the field. My mother sighed, took away the lamb chops and fed us Cheerios for dinner.

She could do that because my father was a physician and she had been to the grocery store to buy food. We didn’t need those home grown lamb chops for survival. It’s astonishing when you think about it.

The Regency!

And all that got me to thinking that if you don’t have electricity, you know what dark is. You know there are degrees of outside dark at night and how incredibly bright a full moon is. You can see the stars at night.

Even if you, in the Regency past, do not yourself farm, you are aware of the seasons of farming and what that means for the food that can be easily put on your plate at a given season. Your mode of transportation is your own two feet or powered by an animal who must be fed, watered and cared for.

In the developed world of the 21st century we’ve gotten very far from nature, and every now and then, I get reminded of that.

Since I write stories set in the past, I think it’s a good idea for me to occasionally take a few moments to think of all the ways I am divorced from nature and all the lore we no longer know– because we have no reason to care exactly when the full moon is, for example — and that people in the Regency did know.

Not that I’d give up my civil rights, vaccinations or my iPhone. But it’s interesting to think about.

What do you think we miss most from that past? What modern invention could you least do without? Let’s take medicine off the table on that last one because everyone chiming in with “Antibiotics!” and “Emergency Room Staff” would get dull pretty quickly.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Lampchops, Nature, Starry Nights | 8 Replies

Historical Ninjas?

Updated on February 16, 2011 by carolyn

Please don’t ask me why I was searching Google Books for references to ninja between 1795 and 1820. Just accept that I was and that I was expecting there to be close to zero results.

But below, is the first of two pages of results.

The examiner: Volume 9 – Page 127

Leigh Hunt – 1819 – Free Google eBook – Read

… or ngninst whose return, a Petition is depending, or of a Member who is sixty years of age, (suppose he wishes to be excused), such name, is set aside, and another is drawn to supply his place until forty-ninja be selected. …

books.google.com – More editions – Add to My Library▼ – In My Library: Change▼

►

Holy moly! Forty NINJAS? That’s no lone ninja a long way from home. That’s an invasion! DURING THE REGENCY! How could we not know about this?

(Because they are ninjas, that’s why.)

So, of course I clicked. Who wouldn’t? I mean ninjas in England in 1819 and they’re all acting like, hey, let’s keep picking until we have an attack force of FORTY of these motherf*ckers. Napoleon would be toast if, uh, he weren’t already.

Alas, the reality was disappointing to say the least.

But if among these names is that of a Member who given a vote in the election complained of or who is a Petitioner or ngninst whose return a Petition depending or of a Member who is sixty years of suppose he wishes to be excused such name is set and another is drawn to supply his place until forty be selected When the forty nine are complete the or his Agent names a Member and the

All the rest were foreign language results. Those Romans, Germans and Italian-post-Latin speakers! Always the fake ninjas.

Kind of disappointing. So. Help me out here.

Your Task

You command the Ninja attack force in London, 1815. What do you do with them? Or, alternatively, provide a snippet of Regency Ninja Lore.

Like, A Regency Ninja is thought to have infiltrated Almack’s, assassinated six debutantes and eleven Regency Bucks in pink waiscoats and vanished after spiking the orgeat with sake.

Or something.

Comment away.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Ninjas | 7 Replies