Category: Jane Austen

The Current State of Bookcovers

Updated on October 3, 2011 by Diane Gaston

Today (or tomorrow) I’m the Take Ten With guest at Cover Cafe, talking about the bookcovers in my life.

We’ve addressed the topic of bookcovers a few times at Risky Regencies, most recently by Elena. It’s a topic I never tire of. I love how romance covers follow trends, like clinch covers and decapitated people. I thought I’d see what the current trends seem to be.

I peeked into Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and some Romance review sites and looked at the romance covers for October.

In Regency and Victorian historical romances the trend seems to be toward featuring the heroine on the cover, usually in a beautiful dress that might be half-off. Here’s a sample:

Interestingly enough, Scottish Historicals did feature the hero. And Westerns.

There were still a few traditional covers:

Funny, my recent covers show all the trends. Traditional. Hero-featured. Heroine-featured:

Do you agree with my conclusions? What trends do you see? What kind of covers do you prefer?

Speaking of covers….October 1 was the release for my new Undone short eStory. The Liberation of Miss Finch tells the story of what happened to Claude, the boy my three soldiers rescued at Badajoz. Check my website to see what else is new and to enter my contest.

Leave a comment on my blog on Thursday for a chance to win a signed copy of Regency Improprieties.

Posted in Jane Austen | Tagged cover art, Jane Austen | 17 Replies

Classics and Winners!

Updated on October 1, 2011 by Elena Greene

When my daughters were young, I read to them all the time. This summer, I had the joy of doing it again.

We’ve always had a rule of reading the book before watching the movie. I wanted us all to be able to watch THE LORD OF THE RINGS together, so I was urging my younger daughter to start reading THE HOBBIT. Although an avid reader, she resisted, saying she didn’t like reading books with long paragraphs. And so I decided to read THE HOBBIT aloud to her, and discovered that she was right. Tolkien did tend to use longer paragraphs than is common in more recent fiction and it can look a bit daunting on the page.

The previous summer, I read PRIDE AND PREJUDICE to my older daughter, again in preparation for watching the films. Much as I love Jane Austen, I know her style is difficult for young teens, with sentences that can run paragraphs long and paragraphs that can take over a whole page. And confusing period details. (“No, undressed ball does not mean they go naked.”) So when I suggested she try NORTHANGER ABBEY this summer, she still wanted me to read along with her. How could I refuse?

The whole reading-together project was a huge success. My younger daughter is now reading THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING on her own, and the older one is moving on to EMMA. So I’ve got them firmly hooked on some classics! I feel vindicated as a mother.

As an author, though, I’m aware that modern readers can have difficulty with older styles of writing. I would never write a sentence as long as this one:

Mrs Morland was a very good woman, and wished to see her children everything they ought to be; but her time was so much occupied in lying-in and teaching the little ones, that her elder daughters were inevitably left to shift for themselves; and it was not very wonderful that Catherine, who had by nature nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, baseball, riding on horseback, and running about the country at the age of fourteen, to books—or at least books of information—for provided that nothing like useful knowledge could be gained from them, provided they were all story and no reflection, she had never any objection to books at all.

There are also some grammatical constructions that trip up the reader, such as “Are not you wild to know?” Did your mind automatically change it to “Are you not wild to know?” That’s what happened to me as I was reading aloud, and it made me stumble.

I want to have a period feel to my books, but I do avoid anything like that that could trip up a reader. I also tend to use pretty short paragraphs, because I think having some white space is easier on the eyes.

But what a shame it would be if no one bothered to get past some of the challenges in the classics, if the stories lived on only in their films (fantastic as many of them are).

What do you think?

But before we chat, here are the winners of this week’s drawing for the Kindle edition of LADY EM’S INDISCRETION.

Willaful
Margay
Cathy P
Girlygirlhoosier52
Tracey

Congratulations! Please send your email and the email of a friend who you think might enjoy the Kindle ebook to elena @ elenagreene dot com.

Elena
www.elenagreene.com
www.facebook.com/ElenaGreene

Posted in Jane Austen | Tagged Bespelling Jane Austen, classics, Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien | 7 Replies

Megan with the Revising Snafu

Updated on September 30, 2011 by megan

Hello Friday, goodbye September!

Next week I begin revising–yet again–my Regency-set historical. I don’t dread slashing my words, I’m really very cavalier in relation to my creations (son aside; I’m not as cavalier about his welfare), but I do feel at sea about how exactly to begin. Because the story as I’ve told it is as I wanted to tell it, but it seems it doesn’t work for all people. So I have to figure out how to make it more universally compelling, and that is a task, indeed.

But that’s boring writer stuff. In non-boring writer stuff, I am very excited to see two upcoming HUGE films: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (the English language version) and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. I read both books in anticipation of the films, and from their respective trailers, it looks like both rock the house.

The cast for TTSS is phenomenal: Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, John Hurt, Ciaran Hinds, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hardy (swoon), Mark Strong, and Toby Jones. How can it be bad? No, wait, it could be. But advance word from the UK, where it’s already playing, says it’s not.

I like the fall since the summer blockbuster films have all run their course, and we can get down with some more substantive movies.

So inbetween sweating character motivation and such, I’m going to be heading to the movie theater. Happy October!

Megan

Posted in Jane Austen | Tagged Jane Austen, Megan | 5 Replies

A recycled post: What would yoube?

Updated on September 29, 2011 by Janet Mullany

Sorry about this. I thought I’d take a look and see what was up at the Riskies, lateish in the afternoon, and realized it was Thursday, my day to blog. It doesn’t feel like a Thursday, you see. I’m at work…

So here’s a recycled post from a couple years ago which raised some interesting discussions then and might yet do so again. And next week, absolutely new content, I promise–an interview with a vampire.

I spoke at a workshop a few weeks ago with some other historical writers, and when we asked for questions, a woman asked this:

If I’d lived two hundred years ago, what would I be?

Chances are, we told her, you wouldn’t be a member of the aristocracy, or own land or wealth. If you lived in America, more than likely you’d be someone’s property. Adam Hochschild, author of Bury The Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves calculates that at the beginning of the English abolitionist movement, approximately two-thirds of the world’s population was in some form of slavery or bondage.

So…you’re living in England during the Regency. You’re not Lady Something or the Hon. Miss Something-Else. You’re not even a gentleman’s daughter. You have to earn a living.
If you were born in the country, you might be able to stay there–always assuming you weren’t forced out by foreclosure–or you might seek a job in a mill or factory in one of the rapidly growing industrial cities.

Or, you might go into service. Here’s another amazing statistic: in the eighteenth century, one-third of all the population (with the exception of the aristocracy) was in service at some time in their lives—usually until their mid-twenties. About one-third of London’s population was servants. Some people, working in the houses of the rich, rose in the ranks to enter the servant elite as butler, housekeeper, or lady’s maid; even though this illustration is from the mid-eighteenth century, you can see how well-dressed this lady’s maid is. Servants earned room and board, plus “perks”—for a ladies maid or valet, cast-off clothing they could wear or sell—or “vails,” tips from visitors usually given to footmen. The maidservant illustration is from the mid-nineteenth century, but gives you an idea of what it was like being at the beck and call of a bell, and negotiating stairs in a long skirt, possibly carrying something worse than a tea service. Becoming a servant for a few years gave you upward mobility; hopefully you’d have saved enough to leave, marry, and own your own business—a shop, maybe—and have a servant or two of your own.

But life was uncertain and who knows where you might end up (another interesting statistic, although one I find difficult to believe: one third of the female population of London during the nineteenth century were prostitutes). You might find yourself reviewed in Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, a sort of Michelin Guide to whores for the discerning gentleman.

Your best bet, really, as we told the woman smart enough to ask this interesting question, was to marry as well as you could.

So what what would you be?

If you want to be a contest winner, visit my website, sign up on my mailing list to enter my contest, and read various excerpts including one from JANE AUSTEN: BLOOD PERSUASION.

Posted in Jane Austen | Tagged Harris's List, Jane Austen, servants | 5 Replies

Cocktails

Updated on September 27, 2011 by Amanda McCabe/Laurel McKee

Happy Tuesday, everyone! I was out last night, hanging out in the bar of my favorite local restaurant (Ludivine, if you happen to be in the Oklahoma City area! Go there–it is fantastic…), and we started speculating on what the first cocktail might have been. So we had to get someone’s phone out and Google it. Here is what we found:

There were things like punches and syllabubs that had recipes from the Renaissance era, but the earliest known printed use of the word “cocktail” was on April 28, 1803 in The Farmer’s Cabinet: “Drank a glass of cocktail—excellent for the head…Call’d at the Doct’s. found Burnham—he looked very wise—drank another glass of cocktail.”

The earliest definition of a cocktail can be found in The Balance and Columbian Repository out of Hudson, NY: “Cocktail is a stimulating liquor composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters—it is vulgarly called a bittered sling and is supposed to be an excellent electioneering potion, inasmuch as it renders the heart stout and bold, at the same time that it fuddles the head. It is said, also to be of great use to a candidate: because a person, having swallowed a glass of it, is ready to swallow any thing else.”