Author Archives: Gail Eastwood

About Gail Eastwood

Gail Eastwood is the author of seven Regencies that were originally published by Signet/Penguin. After taking ten years off for family matters, she has wobbled between contemporary romantic suspense and more Regency stories, wondering what century she's really in and trying to work the rust off her writing skills. Her backlist is gradually coming out in ebook format, and some are now available in new print editions as well. She is working on the start of a Regency-set series and other new projects. Stay tuned!

Regency Widowhood & a New Release!

Updated on September 10, 2024 by Gail Eastwood

I am very excited to announce that the fourth book in my Tales of Little Macclow series, His Lady to Love, releases this coming Sunday, September 15^th! After the year+ long detour I took to co-author Writing Regency England, I’m so happy to be back to my little Derbyshire village and the fiction stories of my heart.

Here’s the link (it’s also going to be in KU): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DDRKCFH3

The heroine of His Lady to Love, Ailis Murray (known to her intimate friends as “Lissie”), is a young Scottish widow. Many of the widowed heroines we meet in romance fiction have not enjoyed a happy first marriage. I think the reason is simply that the heroine’s lack of previous emotional engagement makes the new romance easier to have the “first love” depth and intensity readers enjoy. But I always like a challenge and frequently prefer to swim against the current. What if our heroine doesn’t fit that mold?

Lissie loved her first husband deeply and after a year is still grappling to some extent with her grief. She is very resistant to falling in love again. She believes that she has “had her one great love” and isn’t willing to settle for a less satisfying relationship. She doesn’t want to wed again. (Naturally I hope the reader will be rooting for her to be proven wrong!) But the emotional risk is not her only reason for not wanting another marriage.

To understand the potential benefits of widowhood in the Regency, we need to take a quick look at what it meant for women to be married.

Black & white woodcut engraving of a Regency couple. She is seated, wiht one hand on her breast, looking excoted, while he kneels in front of her and is kissing her hand. Very romantic!

Regency lovers, woodcut 1815

Marriage in Georgian and Regency society was considered the ultimate point of womanhood. Procreation was necessary for the continuation of society. In the upper classes, children meant maintaining the structure of the ruling strata of society, while in the lower classes, they meant maintaining the supply of workers in the laboring strata. But also, in these periods, the alternatives for women were few. Being married meant survival and sustenance—being protected and provided for by a man.

I think it is very hard for us in this modern age to fully grasp how different things were for women back then in an entirely male-dominated world! The trade-off for the life-long sustenance and (assumed) safety of marriage was that wives had no rights of their own. Legally, marriage was seen as unifying the couple into a single entity. Once married, everything a woman owned, earned, or was given belonged to her husband (unless protected in some way, such as a trust). A wife was legally dependent on her husband for everything, seen as essentially a sub-unit of the man she is attached to.

Obviously, there were women who defied the system, but they were the rare cases. And if widows hadn’t adequate means of support from some source after their husbands died, marrying again was the necessary alternative to suffering in severe poverty. But widows who had an income source, having fulfilled society’s expectations by marrying, could enjoy a freedom that no wives, spinsters, or younger unwed misses were granted. For widows, marrying again meant giving up their freedom and submitting themselves back into the legal invisibility of being a wife.

Lissie is a wealthy widow. Her late husband, who owned multiple properties including estates, undeveloped land, shipping interests, and even a woolen mill, left everything to her. And immediately, despite her mourning, suitors flocked to her. The wealth attracted them but also society assumed a woman had not the skill or intelligence needed to manage such assets. Except Lissie has already been managing all of it, for her husband was ill the last two years of their marriage and trained her in the job.

If she marries, all of her husband’s legacy goes to her new husband. Lissie has dreams and ambitions of her own, ones she expects a husband would not support. So she has practical as well as emotional reasons for resisting our lovely story hero.

I hope you’ll want to see how this romance works out! Our hero has dreams of his own and marriage is not a good fit in his immediate future, although this is a romance where he falls first. How does Scottish Lissie come to be in the English village of Little Macclow, anyway? And how does our hero entice her away from the solitary existence she seeks to get her involved with the affairs of the village?

The books in my series follow a continuing chronology and characters from the earlier books pop up again in later ones, but each book is written to stand alone, so you don’t need to have read the earlier ones to enjoy His Lady to Love even though it is Book #4. I am releasing it in Kindle Unlimited (temporarily). This release is the first time I’ve done that for any of my books, so if you’ve never read one and want to give my work a try, this is a good opportunity! I hope you will.

Do you have any favorite stories with widowed heroines? Did they have good first marriages? Or after bad ones, are they either hoping for a better second chance or soured on the idea of marriage entirely? Have you had experience with any of these outcomes yourself?

Posted in book announcement, Daily Life, Gail Eastwood, Risky Book Talk, Risky Regencies, Weddings| Tagged books, Gail Eastwood, His Lady to Love, new release| 5 Replies

Thames River Postmen: A Regency Innovation plus a Scandal!

Updated on June 12, 2024 by Gail Eastwood

If you follow this blog at all, you know I fall down all kinds of rabbit holes and this was a very interesting one. Technically, I was researching how letters were addressed before there were postal codes or even house numbers, but when I went to the website of the British Postal Museum, first there was a sidebar about postmen’s uniforms (exhibit “Dressed to Deliver” runs to Sept 24). I love anything about historical clothing, so could not resist that! Included was an example of one worn by a Thames River Postman. A what? I could not pass up investigating, and stumbled into what I think is a really fascinating Regency-related story!

The River Thames in London was a huge center of shipping activity during the Regency. The Pool of London was the area below London Bridge where thousands of huge ships moored and thousands more small vessels tended to them, while intermixed with them were houseboats and many other smaller crafts. Regina Walker has a great blogpost about that: https://reganromancereview.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-port-of-london-in-18th-century.html

The Pool of London by John Wilson Carmichael

In 1800, an enterprising Thames Waterman (guild member of the Waterman and Lightman Company) named William Simpson petitioned the Post Office to create the position of River Postman to service the ships. Another man had proposed such a service in the 1790’s but had been turned down. The need was significant and Simpson obtained signatures from merchants, captains, and ship owners to support his request. The duties were to “deliver and collect letters from the various vessels on the river, deliver goods and occasionally ferry people.”

The work was hazardous. As explained on the Postal Museum blog, “All year round they had to manage the tide, winds, cold and fog – not to mention the ships and barges….” All of which meant the job required a high level of skill. Simpson’s assistant drowned while on the job in 1803. Simpson himself died in 1806 from injuries he sustained on a ship while making a delivery.

A later River Postman wrote in 1821: “I must inform you of the accident that happened to the Post Boat on Monday through the violence of the wind. I was delivering a letter on board the Ship Albion near the Tower, when a barge came down and sunk the boat and with great difficulty, I saved my life.”

“Pool of London” by Thomas Luny (1801-1810)

When Simpson died, his widow petitioned the Post Office to put their sixteen-year-old son in his father’s position. He was too young, but as he had already been helping his father with the job, the Post Office decided to allow it.

William (Junior) worked at it for four years without incident. But when the young man was 20 years old for some reason he succumbed to the temptation that access to all this mail provided and stole some mail and a £20 note and fled, taking “a Hackney Coach about 10 o’Clock last night from Brick Fields, Dock Head.” Scandal!!

“Pool of London, Below London Bridge” by Samuel Atkins (1790) at the Courtauld Gallery, London

A reward of £100 was issued, payable on conviction, to anyone who apprehended him. William Junior was caught eventually at the Swan public house, Forest Row, East Grinstead, East Sussex, and sat in London’s Newgate Prison until the time of his trial. In October of 1810 he was convicted and sentenced to hang, although due to his age his sentence was reduced to transportation to Australia to labor there for life.

The scandal did not end of the Thames River Postal Delivery Service, however. Young William’s assistant, Samuel Evans, took over the position and served faithfully until 1832 (making him the one whose report I quoted above). When he retired, his son took it on. That was the start of a family dynasty that lasted until the River Postal Service ended in 1952, served by six successive members of the Evans family.

Did you know about this specialized postal service that began during the extended Regency?

Posted in Daily Life, Gail Eastwood, History, Postal Service, Research | 3 Replies

St. Patrick’s Day in the Regency and other March Miscellanea

Updated on March 19, 2024 by Gail Eastwood

Happy first day of Spring! I hardly feel ready to be this far along in the month—March seems to be flying by. Is yours? But I have some March-related random thoughts to share.

St. Patrick’s Day was just two days ago. In New England, where I live, we have lots of people of Irish descent, so St. Patrick’s Day is lively and in many places includes parades, not just busy pubs. I imagine that in Regency-era Ireland, the day would have been celebrated, but in Regency England I expect not.

Why? First and foremost, because there was still some pretty strong anti-Catholic sentiment lingering in England at the time, although it was slowly improving. Celebrating a “saint’s day” would have been considered papist. Yes, they did celebrate Valentine’s Day, but not in any religious connection–only as a day for giving or exchanging love tokens and sentiment.

Second, St. Patrick’s Day was a distinctly Irish observance. Prejudice against the Irish was still fairly strong, too, apart from their chosen religious persuasion, Catholic or Protestant. English upper classes viewed the Irish (in general) as uneducated ruffians, rather the same view many had about the Scots. Of course, the “uneducated” part was partially unavoidable for many Irish, since the English then still did not allow Catholics to attend universities. I haven’t researched this, but I have the sense the working classes also harbored prejudice against the Irish, partly taking their cue from the upper classes above them, but also seeing them as competition for much-needed jobs.

I recently read G. L. Robinson’s new Regency romance release, Repairing a Broken Heart, which is set in Ireland for much of the story. Among the things I liked about it, besides the unusual setting and the background about horse breeding and selling, was how well the author handled depictions of the various Irish characters and the attitudes and tensions stemming from the prejudices and from the occupation of Ireland by the British military at that time.

Did you know that St. Patrick’s Day is also St. Gertrude’s Day? I just learned this, and of course can’t resist a rabbit hole so had to go and learn all about her. She lived in what is now Belgium in the 7^th century, became a nun and the abbess of a “double” monastery (men & women) founded by her mother at Nivelles, partly to escape from politics and unwanted marriages designed around wealth and power-grabbing. She did a lot of good works, did a couple of miracles (required for sainthood) and is the patron saint of gardeners, travelers, and widows. She is also associated with pest prevention—notably mice and rats—and so became associated with cats. A modern view of her makes her out as also the patron saint of cats, something endearing to me!

She does have an Irish connection besides sharing her date with St. Patrick. She befriended many traveling Irish monks who often stayed at the monastery in Nivelles. One of them predicted she would die on March 17 (as she did) and told her that St. Patrick (whose life was much earlier) was waiting to greet her spirit.

Lastly, today is the first day of spring, the date of the vernal equinox. Well, it barely falls inside today’s date, since it will occur this evening at 11:06:20 p.m. EDT. So technically, it will occur on March 20 in some parts of the northern hemisphere! (Of course it’s the start of autumn in the southern hemisphere. As our days become longer, theirs will be getting shorter.)

But if the start of spring feels a little early to you, there’s reason. This is said to be the earliest spring equinox occurrence in the past 128 years! The reasons are more about calendars and the imprecise ways we mark time than any natural cause—factors related to leap years and daylight savings time. Are you interested in those complications? If so, check out this article at space.com. I have to admit trying to follow it all made my brain hurt, LOL! But I wish you a safe and happy spring, all the same!

Posted in Risky Regencies| Leave a reply

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Updated on February 14, 2024 by Gail Eastwood

Just a quick visit to wish you a Happy Valentine’s Day! Since we “Riskies” all write romance, it did not seem right to let this day focused on celebrating romance go by without posting something here.

Regency lovers, woodcut 1815

The World’s Oldest Love Poem:

While this is neither a Regency poem nor something that would have been known of in the Regency period, I still think you might be interested to read about the “world’s oldest love poem“, so here is a link to read about it.

A love match between an ancient king of Sumeria and his people’s Goddess of Love sounds like it could be a good plot for a book, following ancient mythology. Not sure it could be made to fit into a Regency –well, unless it was an “alternate-reality” Regency, and some of those have been great fun! Anyone up for a tale where the ancient goddess is still around, desperately in love with an unsuspecting Regency rake? <g> Feel free to pursue this, if you’re a writer –I already have too many other stories on my to-do list to add any new ones!

Happy Valentine’s Day!

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Dropping the Ball –Regency Style

Updated on January 29, 2024 by Gail Eastwood

“Dropping the ball” in the modern sports-inspired idiom means failing to carry through on some task or responsibility, which seems appropriate given my failure to post this article sooner. I fully intended to post it at the beginning of the month, but life got in the way (my husband got a pacemaker implant and needless to say my attention was mostly on him!). But if your January has sped by as fast as mine, it should not seem long since New Year’s Day, LOL!

I bring up ball-dropping because on New Year’s Eve it has become a “time-honored” custom (since 1907) to drop a giant electronic time-ball from a tower in Times Square, NYC, to welcome in the new year. But did you know that the “ball drop” tradition ties back to maritime England in 1818? Yes, solidly within the Regency period.

Wikipedia says the ancient Greeks used a ball drop to help track time, but the first “modern” time ball was created and installed in Portsmouth, England. Here’s a quote from the article:

“The first modern time ball was erected at Portsmouth, England, in 1829 by its inventor Robert Wauchope, a captain in the Royal Navy.”
The BBC News website has an article referencing Wauchope with interesting details (would you expect me not to follow this rabbit hole?). According to that article, Wauchope’s first idea was a system of flags that would be visible at sea to help mariners calculate their position by knowing the accurate time. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-humber-58559814

He first began soliciting interest in his “modernized” idea in 1818. His proposal, Plan for ascertaining the rates of chronometers by signal, described the time-ball, a large hollow metal sphere rigged on a pole and attached to a mechanism so that it might be dropped at an exact time each day. The ball installed in Portsmouth was the first test of his idea.

Wikipedia says: “Others followed in the major ports of the United Kingdom (including Liverpool), and around the maritime world.” The one on the Nelson Tower in Edinburgh is shown below.

“One was installed in 1833 at the [Greenwich Observatory] in London by the Astronomer Royal, John Pond, originally to enable tall ships in the Thames to set their marine chronometers, and the time ball has dropped at 1 p.m. every day since then.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Observatory,_Greenwich)

Except in windy weather, according to a source in the BBC article. The pole in Greenwich is relatively weak and strong wind is a hazard. In 1853, the Greenwich pole broke and the huge ball crashed to the ground! (In this photo it looks to me as though the pole may have since been reinforced!)

When American and French ambassadors visited England, Wauchope also submitted his idea to them. The United States Naval Observatory was established in Washington, D.C., and the first American time ball went into service there in 1845.

Wikipedia describes the process: “Time balls were usually dropped at 1 p.m. (although in the United States they were dropped at noon). They were raised half way about 5 minutes earlier to alert the ships, then with 2–3 minutes to go they were raised the whole way. The time was recorded when the ball began descending, not when it reached the bottom. With the commencement of radio time signals (in Britain from 1924), time balls gradually became obsolete and many were demolished in the 1920s.”

New York City’s contemporary version of the time-ball has been used since 31 December 1907 at Times Square as part of its New Year’s Eve celebrations. Quoting Wikipedia again, “At 11:59 p.m., a lit ball is lowered down a pole on the roof of One Times Square over the course of the sixty seconds ending at midnight. The spectacle was inspired by an organizer having seen the time ball on the Western Union Building in operation.”

The article also says only 60 of these time balls still remain in locations around the world –I found it interesting that eight are in the United Kingdom, seven are in Australia, including one at the Sydney Observatory (shown below), three are in the United Sates and three in New Zealand.

Belated wishes for a Happy New Year, everyone!

P.S. A shorter version of this article was posted on Facebook, in the readers’ group “Regency Kisses: Lady Catherine’s Salon.” I’ve mentioned the group here before –it is focused on “sweet/low heat” Regency romances and authors, so if you are on FB and read all types of Regencies, you might like to take a look. It is a great place to discover new authors to try, while waiting for the next books to release from your “Risky Regency” writers here!