Author Archives: Janet Mullany

Sneak preview of new BBC Pride & Prejudice

Updated on February 7, 2008 by Janet Mullany

Bedchamber with a young Mr. and Mrs. Bennett in four poster bed. Zoom in on bare breasts.
Mrs. Bennett: Yes, yes!
Fade Scene as above.
Mr. Bennett: Yes, yes!
Fade Scene as above.
Concerned bystander (stepping in front of camera): I don’t think the book starts like this.
Director: Of course it doesn’t. Get him out, someone. Okay, we’ve had Jane and Lizzy’s conceptions, who’s next?

*******

Shot of countryside. A group of young women walk across the landscape. Repeat.

*******
Grounds of Pemberly. Pond. Matthew McFadyen emerges wearing wet shirt.

**********

Upstairs, the Bennett’s house. Jane dressing for the ball.
Jane: Does this make my butt look big?
Zoom in on her almost naked breasts.
Elizabeth enters carrying a large basket of out of season flowers. She smiles knowingly.

*******
Shot of countryside in rain. A group of young women walk across the landscape.

*******
Grounds of Pemberly. Pond. Colin Firth emerges wearing wet shirt.

*******

Bennett’s garden. Unspecified number of young women run across the lawn.

*********

Grounds of Pemberly. Pond. Large male pig wallows.

********

Bedchamber. Bedchamber with Lydia and Wickham in four poster bed. Zoom in on bare breasts. Mr. Darcy enters. He glowers.

********

Grounds of Pemberly. Pond. Laurence Olivier emerges wearing wet shirt in black and white.

*******

Bedchamber with Lizzie and Mr. Darcy in four poster bed. Zoom in on bare breasts.

******

The Bennett sisters, topless, walk across a grassy meadow.
Director (stepping in front of camera): What the hell’s this?

BBC Official: Regulations, gov. You haven’t met the official BBC bare breasts quota.

Director: Oh, that’s okay then. Action!

Let us know what silly things you’ve done today, and vote for Rules of Gentility in AAR’s Annual Reader Poll –it’s in the Favorite Funny category.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Pride and Prejudice | 9 Replies

Winter activities

Updated on January 31, 2008 by Janet Mullany

The other morning I walked outside and it smelled like spring–damp and mild. Of course it was Mother Nature fooling around, but it has seemed recently, with the slightly longer days, that spring is on its way. So I started thinking about activities that might make spring seem a little nearer.

For the gardeners among us, the catalogues start arriving, to be seized with damp sticky fingers and fondled and pondered. That got me thinking about food–oh, to be honest, when am I not thinking about food–and so I thought I’d check out what was available in the Regency kitchen garden at this time of year. According to Samuel and Sarah Adams, you could have beetroot, broccoli, cabbage plants (as opposed to cabbage, best in May and all summer, and if someone would like to explain that, please do), celery, endive, leeks, parsley, parsnips, potatoes, and spinach (The Complete Servant, 1825). Not too bad–of course availability of many vegetables would depend on what the weather was like and how deep the ground was frozen–England was emerging from a minor ice age (hence the Frost Fair on the frozen Thames in 1814).

The Adamses don’t mention tomatoes at all at any time of the year, because the fruit/veg, whatever it is, was regarded with some suspicion in England. Allegedly, Hannah Glass’s cookbook of 1758 included a tomato recipe but until the end of the century cooks used them sparingly and mostly for flavoring soups. After all, the plant looked suspiciously like deadly nightshade. Others thought tomatoes might be aphrodisiacs, and the French referred to them as pomme d’amour (love apple). Italians, who adopted the new world oddity with enthusiasm, called them pomi d’oro (golden apple, suggesting that the first varieties to make it to Europe may have been yellow tomatoes).

This gorgeous illustration is of the African tomato from Basil Besler’s Hortus Eystettensis (1613)–you can see more of the prints from the work here.

What are you doing to prepare for spring? Are you dreaming of tomatoes or daffodils or beaches?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged gardening, Samuel and Sarah Adams, tomatoes | 8 Replies

Mad bad and dangerous to know

Updated on January 24, 2008 by Janet Mullany

As the lovely and talented Keira pointed out yesterday, it was Byron’s birthday on Tuesday. (I always remember Byron’s birthday because it’s my father’s birthday too–he just turned 97! Younger than Byron, but not by much.)

So happy birthday, Byron, the ultimate bad boy– mad bad and dangerous to know as the equally mad bad and dangerous Lady Caroline Lamb, defined him. But heck, the man was HAWWWT.

I blogged a little while ago about this excellent book by Jude Morgan about Byron, Shelley, et al, and I urge you to read it–it’s fabulous. (And I’ve just read Symphony by Jude Morgan, about Berlioz and Harriet Smithson, an amazing book. But I’m saving that for another time .) So I thought we’d celebrate Byron’s birthday with some of his quotations–many of which I found at this excellent site, not that there’s a shortage of sites about Byron. And throw in a few more pics of him.

I awoke one morning and found myself famous.

I have great hopes that we shall love each other all our lives as much as if we had never married at all.

Always laugh when you can. It is cheap medicine.

What men call gallantry, and gods adultery,
Is much more common where the climate’s sultry.

The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

A woman should never be seen eating or drinking, unless it be lobster salad and Champagne, the only true feminine & becoming viands.

I am about to be married, and am of course in all the misery of a man in pursuit of happiness.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause for breath,
And love itself have rest.

So share your favorite Byron quote, poem, or anecdote. Or tell us how long it would have taken you to enter into a scandalous and public liaison with him (me: ten minutes).

Learn the latest shocking scandal involving Lord B—- every month via the Riskies newsletter; send an email with NEWSLETTER in the header to riskies@yahoo.com. All contests all the time–enter to win a signed copy of Jane Lockwood’s Forbidden Shores in a contest sponsored by Pam Rosenthal ; and you only have a week left to read an alternate ending to The Rules of Gentility and enter to win a prize at janetmullany.com.

Posted in Risky Regencies | Tagged Uncategorized | 13 Replies

My yearly rant and more of the same…

Updated on January 17, 2008 by Janet Mullany

One of our best-known newspapers wants to do a story for St. Valentine’s Day on romance writers’ bedrooms. Now it is for the Home section, but even so…read the whole entertaining mess at Smart Bitches.

Why do romance writers (and by implication their readers) suffer so in the media? Why are these stereotypes still around? Can we really keep blaming this pink old lady and her dogs? [insert mental pic of Barbara Cartland and her Pekinese here, because Blogger will not let me do the real thing. Thanks]

Here’s my theory. It’s the cult of the storyteller. This is why I find the Cassie Edwards/plagiarism case is so richly ironic. It didn’t matter that Ms. Edwards’s style left something to be desired (to put it mildly) because she was a storyteller. She could spin a tale, tell a story–actually that was debatable–but a lot of people thought so. Somewhere, somehow, a divide developed between those who cared about words and language and those who thought the story mattered the most, when in fact one carries the other.

And now suddenly the words do matter in romance. Unfortunately, they matter because the words in question belonged to someone else.

[mentally insert a fab fairy story illustration here.] The honorable, pre-literate craft of the storyteller relies on the linking catch-phrases–

a year and a day
once upon a time
as I walked out one midsummer morning
they lived happily ever after–

that blend the familiar to the new and unexpected. The mass-market storyteller is allowed, if not encouraged by the industry, to rely on a certain amount of repetition and same-ness; but because storytelling is not a special gather round the fire and eat some more of the mammoth Ug caught occasion, that may result in cliche, staleness, sameness.

So what does this have to do with the lady in pink with the fluffy dogs and diamonds? Why doesn’t romance get respect? It’s not because romance writers are storytellers vs. wordsmiths, or whatever terms you want to use, it’s that romance keeps the divide wide and deep by its insistence that the story is the most important thing, and the only important thing. It is in fact rather like this post where I can’t put the pix in because Blogger is having a bad hair day or something. You know they should be there but they’re not. We know that romance is such a huge market that you can have all sorts of romances and all sorts of writing, but sadly the cliches about the genre and its creators prevail.

It’s a pity it took a drastic case of plagiarism for us to be reminded that the words are important too.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Cartland, Cassie Edwards, language, mammoth, plagiarism, Smart Bitches, storytelling | 19 Replies

Farewell to Flashman

Updated on January 10, 2008 by Janet Mullany

I was sad to hear that George MacDonald Fraser, creator of the Flashman series and one of the great historical novelists of our time, died a few days ago.

Fraser took a minor character, Flashman the school bully, from the nineteenth-century novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays, and elaborated on his later career. Flashman is one of the great literary anti-heroes–quivering in fear, lying and cheating his way out of trouble, and behaving in a thoroughly despicable way (particularly where women are concerned), he manages to become embroiled in just about every military crisis of the nineteenth century. He’s a survivor of the Indian mutiny, the battle of Little Bighorn and the charge of the Light Brigade; and he managed to fight on both sides of the American Civil War. Despite his egregious behavior he manages to emerge from each adventure a revered and adored hero.

His many decorations include the Victoria Cross, US Medal of Honor, and San Serafino Order of Purity and Truth, 4th class, and in addition to his military dishonors Flashy was director of the British Opium Co., honorary president of the Mission for Reclamation of Reduced Females, and author of such works as Twixt Cossack and Cannon and The Case Against Army Reform.

Fraser presents his books as Flashy’s memoirs, based on original documents discovered in an attic, with Fraser’s meticulous footnotes and comments–hilarious stuff and totally devoid of political correctness. Fraser was particularly proud of the fact that in the US, over one third of the reviewers of the first Flashman book thought they were reading genuine memoirs and not meticulously researched and written fiction.

Have you read the Flashman books? What are your favorite moments? One of mine is when Flashy (and I can’t remember whether it’s shortly before or after he’s shot in the backside), meets a young lawyer called Abraham Lincoln and tells him you can’t fool all of the people all of the time… And then there’s the wagon train going west, that includes an entire New Orleans whorehouse on the move and a wagon of invalids, battling the plains for their health…

Great stuff, all twelve volumes, and I’m sorry Fraser didn’t live long enough to finish all the disgraceful episodes of Flashy’s long and eventful life.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Flashman, Fraser | 7 Replies