Author Archives: Janet Mullany

Visit to England

Updated on February 9, 2012 by Janet Mullany

A week ago I was in England for a funerary visit (a very jolly affair, meeting up family members) but despite a cold (mine) and the cold (it was freezing over there!) I did do a few fun things.

First a visit to the Ashmolean museum in Oxford, which was wonderful. Here I am with my daughter and one of two pics I took before my battery died (as usual).

Exactly a week ago I was snuffling my way around Bath in very frigid temperatures–don’t let that blue sky fool you. We visited the Roman Baths and Pump Room and particularly enjoyed the warm, steamy inside parts of the tour.

You can buy a glass of disgusting Bath water for 50p but I think it just isn’t the same when it’s not drawn from water where people with various unpleasant ailments are bathing. We didn’t have afternoon tea at the Pump Room but we did have a Sally Lunn bun with lemon curd which we inhaled without even thinking of a photo opp.

Out into the cold again for a look at the Circus and Royal Crescent. Brrr.

At this point we were so cold and our train on which we had supercheap (as cheap as rail travel gets there) reservations was a long way off, so we went to see a movie, The Artist, which I highly recommend.

We also had time to drop in to William Herschel’s house, one of my favorite places in Bath. I have a soft spot for Herschel, who was a brilliant wacko (he thought people lived on the moon) and his house is beautifully restored.

He started his career as a musician and several of his instruments, including a serpent, are on display as well as artefacts relating to his career as an astronomer.

Here’s a gown belonging to his sister Caroline, a brilliant astronomer (a better one, according to the museum staff, than her more famous brother). She must have been tiny!

And I have to show you this pic of another English eccentric, my brother demonstrating his marmalade making exploits–yes, that’s a chair upended on the kitchen counter to drain the pulp. It’s Seville orange season, a busy time of year in England.

Have you visited any of these places? Ever made marmalade?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged City of Bath, marmalade, Oxford | 9 Replies

Happy birthday, Robert Burns!

Updated on January 25, 2012 by Janet Mullany

I have made a disturbing discovery. In a few hours I will be aboard a plane to England and if there are any Scotsmen aboard, it may not be a restful flight.

Today is Robert Burn’s birthday, celebrated with a traditional Burns Supper which range from stentoriously formal gatherings of esthetes and scholars to uproariously informal rave-ups of drunkards and louts (Robert Burns Country).

Reflecting Burns’ vigorous, earthy, emotional poems, a Burns Supper menu should include Neeps and Tatties (recipe here), featuring the ever popular combo of rutabagas (also known as swedes) and potatoes, and haggis, the great chieftain o’ the pudding race. Mmmm!

… oat-meale mixed with blood, and the Liver of either Sheepe, Calfe or Swine, maketh that pudding which is called the Haggas or Haggus, of whose goodnesse it is in vaine to boast, because there is hardly to be found a man that doth not affect them. The English Huswife, 1615

Here’s a modern recipe for haggis. Hungry yet?

There are many Burns resources online so I thought I’d mention a couple I found. You can find all of his poems at Robert Burns Country including a translation of dialect terms into several languages including American. At robertburns.co.uk you can download the XXX-rated The Merry Muses, which includes such masterpieces as Nine Inch Will Please A Lady. (Talking of which, check out this timeline of Burns’ busy and prolific life at the Burns Museum in his birthplace in Alloway, Scotland.)

And naturally the celebrations are washed down with whiskey/whisky, however you’d like to spell it. And although in Romancelandia Regency dukes swill it like water, it didn’t really catch on until much later, notably after whiskey production became legal in 1823, following years of enthusiastic consumption in Scotland. So unless his grace is Scottish and/or has a still at the bottom of the garden of his London town house, it’s not going to be the ducal beverage of choice. There’s a history of whiskey here which includes an account of the funeral of Peter Grant, who was the oldest survivor of the 1745 Jacobite uprising (110 years old!) in 1824; four gallons of whiskey were drunk even before the coffin was lifted to take to the burial ground.

Questions for you: when did people start drinking whiskey socially in England? And what would you include, including favorite Burns’ poems, at your Burns Supper?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Burns Supper, Robert Burns, whiskey | 6 Replies

Dancing and fine feathers

Updated on January 19, 2012 by Janet Mullany

I attended a Twelfth Night Ball last weekend (a bit late, but who among us really tracks these things?) at Riversdale House Museum. It was fab, I wore my new feathers, and after talking to fellow guests my ladies maid (husband) and I retired to insert my feathers to their upright position. The secret? When you twist your scarf into a turban, you pin in your feathers and use the twist to hold it into place. It will remain upright for some time even after vigorous dancing. If your feathers remain erect for more than four hours, you must seek immediate medical help…

And here’s a video of how to twist a scarf into a turban. And doesn’t this lady in the center, who used this technique, look great?

The ball was a lot of fun with dancing and supper. One interesting thing was that at the beginning we seemed to have more men than women and then toward the end many of the men mysteriously disappeared and so we actually had a distaff set for one of the later dances. In Regency/Federal times they would have retired to drink and smoke, but since this is a fragile historical building, this was not an option. I think they went for a quiet sit down, exhausted by female energy.

Here we are dancing in a room that was originally the house’s stables and carriage house. It’s actually the west wing of the house and went through various incarnations over the past two hundred years and the walls are hung with copies of portraits of the Lords Baltimore, the founders of Maryland (like no one ever lived here before?). The first owner of the house, Rosalie Calvert, married into the family, although she was a Belgian with sophisticated European tastes who had fled to the New World to escape Napoleon.

If you’re in the Washington DC area you must visit Riversdale. Come this Sunday and you’ll meet me–I volunteer as a docent. Coming up on February 11, we have a program on chocolate, Tasting the Past: A Chocolate Sampler, which explores the history of chocolate in America. I definitely plan to attend that one! For a full schedule of events throughout the year, go here.

Other news I have to share today include our own Risky Elena guestblogging at Writer Unboxed on her successful comeback in the age of digital publishing. Go Elena! And you go on over there and say hi!

I linked earlier in the post to turban-tying instructions at American Duchess. This is a wonderful site, with lots of how-to stuff, solid historical research, and a source for historical footwear. If you love Downton Abbey (and who doesn’t, with the exception of me) you have surely noticed the clothes. Even I like the clothes. This is her latest offering, these glorious Astoria shoes from that period. The way it works is that the Duchess must receive pre-orders to go into production and if you put in an order early (now) you’ll receive a discount. Yum.

One of the other reasons this period is so popular right now, other than PBS, is that this April is the 100th anniversary of the Titanic and there’s a lot of historical reenactment connected with it. It’s also the 200th anniversary of the war of 1812, something Riversdale is involved in since the inglorious Battle of Bladensburg took place very near the house, followed by the sacking of Washington. Are you taking part in any events or planning to attend as an observer?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged American Duchess, Riversdale House Museum, shoes, turbans | 6 Replies

End of an era

Updated on January 12, 2012 by Janet Mullany

I’ve been wondering whether to blog about this or not but on the other hand it’s been on my mind. Two weeks ago I showed you a picture of two people a century apart in age, one of whom was my father. He died very peacefully last Sunday after living rather too long and with increasing mental and physical frailty. I saw him last in 2010 and he didn’t really know who I was but accepted cups of tea from me, some of which he said were lousy. Sorry, dad.

Think about it: a hundred years. His mother, at the time of the 1901 census, was 20 and a housemaid in London (possibly a family secret I unearthed) at 28 Alma Square in Marylebone, London, something I now incorporate into my presentation on Regency servants. The house is still there (thanks, google maps, although I don’t know which one it is! It is now a VERY posh area. I don’t think it was in 1901). There’s a lot I don’t know about his family because he wouldn’t volunteer information or talk about them, and he’s the last of his generation by a long shot. He was of Irish descent and his grandfather (who came over from Dublin) drove a hansom cab in London. When he was a very small child he was put on a train to visit relatives and was given chocolate to cheer him up by young soldiers who were going to the front in World War I.

He gave me my appreciation of music and books. I thought everyone went to sleep listening to their father play violin accompanied by their mother on piano. Wrong. Here he is in a local community orchestra, as a youngster of 92, playing that most geeky of instruments, the viola.

He and I had a very nice Jane Austen moment one time when I was a rebellious teenager and we weren’t getting along too well. Somehow we got onto Jane Austen, and I said I liked Emma best and he said he liked P&P, particularly the smackdown scene between Lizzie and Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and we then read it together. I’m trying to think of a way to incorporate this into the funeral service at the end of this month. And if I ever need to think of the way a Regency person would say something, I recall my father’s way of speaking, which had a very old-fashioned cadence. So I owe him a lot.

He read my first book, Dedication, but by then his memory was already going and he had trouble connecting thoughts. He did however comment that he’d be too embarrassed to donate the book to the church jumble sale.

We had some memorable moments when he and my mother visited the States a couple of decades ago. He may have been the only person ever to take a mule ride in the Grand Canyon wearing a necktie (he didn’t feel properly dressed without one). And he was thrilled to find a “Sod and Sodding Services” section in the yellow pages. English people used the term “turf.” Over there, “sod” and “sodding” mean … something else. I cut it out for him and he took it back home to show people.

It’s the end of an era. I’m sad he’s gone but when someone lives this long you have expected it for a long, long time. So don’t feel bad for me, but do tell me about any interesting ancestors you may have!

Posted in Risky Regencies | Tagged Uncategorized | 19 Replies

News for the new year

Updated on January 5, 2012 by Janet Mullany

As usual I’m about a week late with everything but I’ve been thinking a bit about new year’s resolutions. If I make them, which I don’t, it’s something like:

Write more regularly
Maintain a life outside writing
Eat less/better, exercise and all that good stuff
Write real letters to people

All of which are pretty basic and ongoing. So what do I anticipate happening in 2012? First, I have Dedication coming out from Loose-Id, a rewritten version because everyone complained about the breakneck ending and with more sex, although the original had quite a lot. It was originally published as a trad Regency by Signet in 2005 and astonishingly had two bondage scenes and some fairly grown up sort of sex–well, what did they have to lose?–the line was ending.

I’m currently working on revisions of Hidden Paradise, an erotic romance about an Austen scholar who participates in a very glamorous, sexy and cleaned-up Regency living experience, with a cover that proudly proclaims purple passion. After pondering all the fascinating options available to Regency women at a country house party (croquet! embroidery! viewing the family portraits!) I figured out that the only really interesting activity was sex, so that’s what the book is about. That will release in November.

I also have some self-pubbed projects in mind although you can pretty much count on the bottom falling out of the self-pub industry as soon as I come on board. More about those later…

I was thinking that traditionally the old year/new year is represented by extremes of youth and age, so here’s a picture that does just that. My father, who is heading for 101, my brother, and a very new baby that belongs to a neighbor’s daughter. My father didn’t eat the baby although he looks as though he’s going to. I love this pic because I don’t think I’ve ever seen a photograph before (and certainly not in my family although we’re not big photo takers) which includes two people a century apart in age.