Author Archives: Diane Gaston

About Diane Gaston

Diane Gaston is the RITA award-winning author of Historical Romance for Harlequin Historical and Mills and Boon, with books that feature the darker side of the Regency. Formerly a mental health social worker, she is happiest now when deep in the psyches of soldiers, rakes and women who don’t always act like ladies.

Kathleen E Woodiwiss – A Flame Gone Out

Updated on July 9, 2007 by Diane Gaston

Kathleen E Woodiwiss passed away July 6, 2007.
The news crept in quietly on one of my loops, not from the news on TV, radio, or the newspapers. I searched for a news report online. Nothing.

The world does not appreciate, perhaps, what a monumental loss her death is, but I suspect very soon the romance loops, blogs, and message boards will be registering their shock and grief. We’ve lost our pioneer, the woman who launched our modern genre of historical romance, of romance fiction itself. We’ve lost an icon. A mother.

Her son Heath posted the news on her message board. You can read it here. He said that she died of cancer that returned with vengence after the death of another son. In my search for more information I found the notice of Dorren Woodiwiss’s unexpected death June 17, 2007. He’d been only 44.

The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen E Woodiwiss was released in 1972 and became an immediate sensation. It was the first romance novel to open the bedroom door on the hero and heroine. Woodiwiss forged new territory, one that celebrated strong women and showed strong women enjoying their sexuality. The growth of the romance industry to nearly 5o% of all mass market sales shows that readers were hungry for such books and still are.

For me, Woodiwiss help to nurture my love of historical romance. I am not the only romance author who can trace her love of the genre back to Kathleen E Woodiwiss.

I explored Woodiwiss’s website and had to smile. This icon, this pioneer, this mother, talks of the same things we do! Her FAQs speak of familiar reasons to write romance, familiar visions of what makes a hero and heroine. Further exploration online showed that she suffered the occasional bad review and that she had suffered multiple rejections from publishers and agents when she tried to sell The Flame and the Flower. That she doubted herself and her writing sometimes, but at other times got joy from it.

This week the Romance Writers of America, an organizaton of 9,500 members, gathers for its annual convention. Over four hundred of us will be signing our books to raise money for Literacy. We’ll listen to speeches, attend workshops, discuss policies and procedures. We’ll celebrate our finest unpublished and published books of the year. And I’ll bet in every speech, workshop, signing, and ceremony, we will be remembering Kathleen E. Woodiwiss.

And thanking her.

What is your favorite Woodiwiss book? Do you have a memory of reading her for the first time? What has Woodiwiss meant to you, as a reader and/or a writer? As a woman?

I finally found Woodiwiss’s obituary at the Minneapolis Star Tribune online, and information about the funeral from the Strike Funeral Home. There are links to leave words of condolence both places. Fans are also posting on Woodiwiss’s message board and Jude Devereaux’s message board.

Her funeral will be at 11:30 Wednesday, July 11, when we are all gathering for the RWA conference. Amanda, Janet and I will be in the Beau Monde conference, celebrating Regency Historical Romance, and, I suspect, remembering who helped start it all.

I should tell you all that have a new website! My original plan was to spend this blog talking about it, but some things are more important. Come take a look, enter my contest, sign up for my newsletter, send me an email (although I don’t know how to do the email yet!). Next Monday I’ll post about the RWA conference.

After signing up for my newsletter, sign up for the Risky Regency newsletter at riskies@yahoo.com (please put NEWSLETTER in subject line)!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Kathleen E Woodiwiss. Diane Gaston, Romance Writers of America | 6 Replies

Picnic

Updated on July 2, 2007 by Diane Gaston

We are back from Tennessee, where the scenery basically looks like this. I thought as we drove through the mountains that our Regency characters would have been amazed at the endless trees of the Shenandoah, the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Alleghenies.

The family reunion picnic was lovely. We met family we’d never met before and saw folks we had not seen for years. Here we are. All except me, because I’m taking this photo (deliberately distant to protect the family’s privacy) but you can see how many of us came and how lush the picnic area was.

But I got to thinking about the differences in picnics from the Regency time to now . Our picnic was in a public park, not on the grounds of a country estate. We did not have tents erected for shelter from the sun, but the abundant Tennessee trees did a great job of shading our spot. We lugged our own chairs in our own cars and the food was not brought in by servants in horse drawn wagons, rather it arrived in a big SUV. The caterers were certainly not dressed in livery but in Tshirts and bermuda shorts. We ate hot dogs and hamburgers off styrofoam plates and drank (Regency characters may shudder here) iced tea.

There were games for the children – wheelbarrow races, potato sack races, nothing like the decorous maypole dance depicted here.

But I suspect, then as now, we had a wonderful time. The gathering of family and friends is mostly so.

I gave away some of my books. Most of the relatives did not know there was a romance author in the fam. One of my husband’s cousins will be in Dallas at the same time as the Romance Writers Conference and she might come to the booksigning (July 11 5:30 to 7:30 at the Hyatt Regency in Dallas)!

Any family gatherings this summer for any of you? Any family reunion horror stories? Anyone planning to be at the RWA conference or the booksigning?

Maypole image from Jessamyn’s costume pages
Emma photo from the movie Emma

More Silver Forks

Updated on June 25, 2007 by Diane Gaston

I’m still plodding my way through The Silver Fork Society: Fashionable Life and Literature from 1814 to 1840 by Alison Adburgham (Constable and Co, 1983) that I wrote about on June 4. Although I’m out of the strict Regency period, (it is around 1823 now) I have reached a chapter that describes country house parties. This seems perfect to mention, since Amanda has provided us with the country house in which we might all gather for a country house party.

What might we do with ourselves?

Imagine my surprise to discover we might be bored.

Adburgham quotes Thomas Creevy, writing to his step-daughter in 1823 from Lord Sefton’s Stoke Farm:
“My life here is a most agreeable one. I am much the earliest riser in the House, and have above two hours to dispose of before breakfast, which is at 11 o’clock or even later. Then I live with myself again till about 3, when the ladies and I ride for 3 hours or so…We dine at 1/4 past seven, and the critics would say not badly. We drink in great moderation — walk out, all of us, before tea, and then crack okes and fiddle till about 1/2 past 12 or 1. “

I guess it all depends on who we might fiddle with!

Mrs. Arbuthnot, in her journal in June, 1829, spoke of amateur theatricals at country house parties, which, of course, Jane Austen told us about in Mansfield Park. Mrs. Arbuthnot listed several participants at a house party at Lord Salisbury’s Hatfield. She said:
“They acted two plays and I really thought they played better than real actors. “

So I guess we might “put on a show.”

What are your plans to entertain yourselves this summer? I’m headed for a family reunion next weekend in Tennessee- my husband’s father’s side of the family. I’ll report in on it next Monday.

Image of Thomas Creevey is from http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRcreevey.htm
Image of theatrical is Arizona Theatre Company’s 2005 performance of Pride & Prejudice
Image of Melbury House is from Diane’s own collection!

Don’t forget to sign up for the Risky Regencies newsletter, with fun things to do this summer (well, reading our blog is a fun thing). Email riskies@yahoo.com and put Newsletter in the subject line.

Posted in Risky Regencies | Tagged Uncategorized | 9 Replies

Waterloo, A Very Near Run Thing

Updated on June 18, 2007 by Diane Gaston

Bow your heads in honor of the 47,000 brave men who fought and perished June 18, 1815, 192 years ago today at the Battle of Waterloo: 15,000 British, Belgian, Dutch and German soldiers; 7,000 Prussians; 25,000 French. Inconceivable numbers of men lost in a battle that changed history.

When I first decided to write Regency historicals, I immersed myself in as much of the history as I could. My library had a nice collection of audiobooks, and I used to listen to them driving to and from work. One of those books was Waterloo: Day of Battle by David Howarth (published in Great Britain under the title A Near Run Thing: The Day of Waterloo, 1968).

Waterloo: Day of Battle tells the story of Waterloo through the eyes of the soldiers who fought in it, making it a very personal story, very real and emotional. Howarth says the individual soldier experienced the battle “half-blinded by gunsmoke, half-deadened by noise, and either half-paralyzed by fright or driven to a kind of madness by exaltation and the hope of glory.” It is a wonderful book, available used on sites like Allbookstor es.com

There are some good online sites that tell of the battle:
Waterloo for the Uninitiated – June 18th 1815
Wikipedia
or more in depth
BritishBattles.com The Battle of Waterloo

From BritishBattles.com I’ll show some highlights of the battle memorialized in paintings. You can purchase some of these prints at Art.com

Early in the battle the British cavalry, including the Scots Greys shown here, charged the French, at first overwhelming the French, but intoxicated with their success, they advanced too far and did not hear or heed the bugles to retreat. French Cavalry, fresh in the battle, soon cut them off. The regiments were almost completely destroyed.

On the western side of the Allied line was the chateau and farm of Hougoumont, 3,500 men were charged with the defense of Hougoumont to protect the Allied forces from being outflanked by the French. Hougoumont was one part of the battlefield that Napoleon could see clearly and perhaps it is for that reason he poured many French resources in attempting to take it, unsuccessfully.

French General Ney ordered his cavalry to attack what he thought were retreating Allied troops, but he found instead solid British squares, and though his cavalry attacked again and again, the squares held. The movie Waterloo , starring Rod Steiger as Napoleon; Christopher Plummer as Wellington, shows an wonderful aerial recreation of this cavalry attack.

In spite of the brave, heroic, and stubborn British forces, the day might have gone to Napoleon had not the Prussians under General Blücher arrived in time.

After the battle, two square miles were covered with those 47,000 dead and dying, their shrieks and cries could be heard throughout the night as more horror assaulted them. Looters, primarily from the British and Prussian armies plundered the dead and killed the dying for their loot.

Throughout Howarth’s Waterloo: Day of Battle, he weaves a love story. Colonel Sir William De Lancey, on Wellington’s staff, had married Magdalene Hall three months earlier and she had followed him to Belgium. When word came to her that he was wounded, she searched for him and found him in a cottage near Mont St, Jean, no more than a hovel. She stayed by his side, nursing him for eleven days. At his request she lay next to him one night. The next day he died in her arms.