Category: Regency

My first Jane Austen

Updated on December 19, 2013 by susanna

I’m closing out Jane Austen’s birthday week by offering copies of the Cozy Classics board book editions of Pride and Prejudice and Emma, along with my novella A Dream Defiant in your choice of electronic format. Comment by 9 PM Pacific Standard Time on Sunday (that’s midnight Eastern) for a chance to win!

Emma image

I have a humiliating confession to make:

The first time I read Jane Austen, I got about a chapter in and then quit.

I was 14 or so, and I’d taken to reading my hometown library’s extensive collection of Georgette Heyer, Clare Darcy, and Marion Chesney. They were real, adult love stories I didn’t have to hide from my mom. Which wasn’t the case with historical romance in general. Anything with the lurid “bodice ripper” covers so prevalent in the 1980’s wasn’t quite forbidden to me, but they led to lectures on appropriate entertainment, the importance of waiting till marriage to have sex, etc. I occasionally snuck such books into the house regardless, but for the most part I just found ways to read what I liked that flew under Mom’s radar–e.g. you’d never guess how much sex is in the Earth’s Children series by the covers.

But I digress. Our librarian noticed me working my way through Heyer, Darcy, and Chesney and said I really MUST try this book called Pride and Prejudice.

So I checked it out, took it home, and tried to read it. But I couldn’t quite follow what was going on somehow, and the arch wit of the writing completely went over my earnest, angsty young head. So I gave up and set it aside.

I didn’t try Austen again until just after college, when I was 23 or 24. Again I started with Pride and Prejudice–and this time it instantly clicked. I plowed through all six of her novels one after the other, and I’ve re-read them more times than I can count in the years since.

P&P illustration

I’m still baffled and not a little embarrassed by my adolescent self’s failure to Get It. It’s not like I was a poor reader–I loved Jane Eyre, and I read Romeo and Juliet for fun at 12, albeit an annotated version with footnotes clarifying all the language and references I didn’t yet have the maturity and experience to pick up on my own. Maybe I would’ve done better with an annotated Austen to explain the entail, the relative social positions of the Bennetts, Darcys, and Bingleys, and everything else that baffled me then but made perfect sense a decade later.

Or maybe I just wasn’t for anything that wry and subtle. Those Regencies I was plowing through were by far the least angsty and dramatic fiction I was reading at the time, and even Heyer isn’t quite in the same league as Austen for subtlety, IMHO.

What about you? How old were you when you got your first taste of Austen, and did you immediately connect to her stories? Do you have a favorite book by any author that didn’t work the first time you read it?

Posted in Giveaways, Jane Austen, Reading, Regency | Tagged Susanna Fraser | 17 Replies

Winter Wonderland

Updated on December 9, 2013 by Diane Gaston

Last week I discoursed (i.e. complained) about dipping temperatures and the arrival of winter weather. Lest you think Virginia has gone into another Little Ice Age, we had temperatures near 70 F last week. This past Sunday, though, winter returned.

Like most of the Midwest and MidAtlantic, we had a winter storm. Sunday we had snow and freezing rain. Today it has turned to rain. Here’s the view of our deck. Icicles on the bird feeders!

Luckily we don’t have to leave the house. I did what all good Virginians do when winter weather is forecast. I went to the grocery store and stocked up on milk, toilet paper, cat food and assorted snacks, so we are free to hibernate–at least until the cat food runs out.

In the Regency, that is what people did in winter weather. They stayed at home and stayed as dry and warm as they could. Of course, not everyone could do that. Coaches did get caught in storms.

There are some wonderful blogs about Regency winters in Jane Austen’s World, one of my go-to sites for great information:
1. Snow Sports and Winter Transportation in the Regency Era
2. Keeping Warm in the Regency Part One and Part Two

If you are snowbound today (or even if you aren’t!) come to the Harlequin.com’s Holiday Open House. Today the Historical Authors are hosting a Holiday Ball. Come and see what refreshments are offered and what heroes are waiting to ask you to dance. There’s a chance to win prizes, too!

And don’t forget. The Harlequin Historical Authors Holiday Giveaway is still progressing. Access the Advent calendar here and see how to enter my part of the contest here.

What is your favorite thing to do when winter weather shuts you in?

Posted in Giveaways, Regency | Tagged Harlequin.com, Jane Austen's World | 5 Replies

On Holidays, Period Food, and What We Feed Our Characters

Updated on December 6, 2013 by Gail Eastwood

Having finally finished the clean-up from Thanksgiving (the wedding crystal goblets I have to wash by hand tend to decorate the kitchen counter for days), I am now looking ahead to the next holidays, and more meals to be planned in celebration. Special occasions and special food always go together. Do you have a traditional holiday food you make or fondly remember? For Christians, this past Sunday was the first Sunday in Advent, the season leading up to Christmas, and in some parts of England, is also known as “stir-up day” –the day you are supposed to stir-up the batter for your Christmas cake or pudding so it will have enough time to age properly. (The day can also be the last Sunday before the start of Advent.) There’s a double meaning to the name, as one of the old texts used by the church for the start of Advent begins “Stir up , we beseech thee O Lord” and one site claims “this activity of stirring-up the ingredients symbolizes our hearts that must be stirred in preparation for Christ’s birth.” Christmas cakes (aka fruitcakes) have a pedigree as long as the technique of using rum or brandy to preserve food. “Plum Pudding” was also around long before the Victorians popularized it as “Christmas pudding”. Either one could include meat with the dried fruit in their early forms, but one is baked and the other was boiled –steamed in later times.

For someone who’s not a great cook, maybe it’s ironic that I’ve always been interested in period food, but it comes honestly from my interest in the daily life of other times. The Regency isn’t my only pet period –I’m a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism and indulge in medieval interests, too. I collect cookbooks on period food, and recently added Dinner with Tom Jones: Eighteenth Century Cookery Adapted for the Modern Kitchen, by Lorna Sass (1977, the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Sass also wrote To the King’s Taste (Richard II) and To the Queen’s Taste (Elizabeth I).

I can’t believe I found this treasure in my church yard sale!! I recommend it as a research gold-mine; it has notes about menus, how dishes should be arranged on the table, and all sorts of extra goodies besides the recipes, and while it covers a period slightly earlier than our beloved Regency, back then things did not change as rapidly as they do now. Casting about for what to feed our characters, a ragoo of asparagus or heavens, yes, a chocolate tart(!) might be just the thing we need to serve them. And the book is illustrated with delightful sketches of county life by Thomas Rowlandson (behaving properly for a change).

On my Christmas list is another cookbook just released last month which should also be of great interest to us all —Dinner with Mr Darcy by Pen Vogler, a new addition to the existing canon related to food in Jane Austen’s books and life. Besides recipes inspired by Jane’s novels and letters, it also promises notes about table arrangements, kitchens and gardens, changing mealtimes, and servants and service, etc.

Both of these books use Hannah Glasse’s first cookbook, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747), as a chief source. A reviewer of Vogler’s book (http://tinyurl.com/mlrxl6j) says this was “one of the first commercial cookbooks to capture the public imagination and was used by middle-class families like the Austens well into the 19th century.” Does food history interest you? Do you care about what our story characters eat? (The book I’m editing now for reissue, The Captain’s Dilemma, has a running joke about the family’s inventive but not very good cook.) What are some of your favorite resources?

I wish you all very happy holidays and some memorable meals with friends and family, whatever you celebrate!

Mr Collins (Tom Hollander) distracts Elizabeth Bennett (Keira Knightley) from her meal in the 2005 ‘Pride and Prejudice’ -Photo Credit: Rex Features/Everett Collection

Posted in History, Jane Austen, Regency, Research | Tagged Christmas, Christmas cake, food, holidays, period cooking, plum pudding, Regency, research books | 13 Replies

The Elegant Regency

Updated on November 16, 2013 by Myretta

Cabinet on a stand

Last weekend, I went to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts to see the John Singer Sargent Watercolors exhibit, which was quite wonderful. I’m a big JSS fan. But I’m not here to tell you about that. One of the smaller exhibits that caught my eye as I was trying to find my way through the maze that is the MFA was the much smaller Art of the English Regency. (I just had to go back to make sure Elena hadn’t covered this in her posts about her visit to the MFA – she didn’t, but if you haven’t read her posts on Regency Pianos and Esoteric Strings, you should).

Although this exhibit is called Art of the English Regency, it’s mostly about Regency interior design with a solid representation of Thomas Hope, the father of interior design. It was a vivid illustration of the frequently outlandish design choices made by the Beau Monde.

Griffin Tripod STands

Some of the furniture was along the elegant lines we would like to think of when we decorate our Regency townhouses, but quite a lot of it reflected the ubiquitous Egyptian Revival and equally insane furniture designs. My particular favorite was the pair of griffin tripod stands complete with clawed feet (Griffin claws, I suppose). But we should not ignore the cabinet on a stand attributed to James Newton, which combines the elegant Regency lines with decorations that look like lion’s head doorknockers and Egyptian sarcophagi.

George IV

Of course, your room needs to be lighted and what better than chimera candlesticks and griffin wall lights (perhaps to complement your griffin tripod stand). And, you it wouldn’t be complete with out a (very flattering) bust of George IV.

This little jewel of an exhibit was an excellent reminder of the kinds of interiors our characters might have chosen to live in. It was fun to visit and maybe fun to live with. What do you think?

Posted in History, Regency, Research | 5 Replies

Christmas Past (and yet to come!)

Updated on November 14, 2013 by susanna

I’m normally the type who keeps all Christmas activities strictly confined to the six weeks or so between Thanksgiving and Epiphany. I never Christmas shop before Black Friday. I wouldn’t dream of putting decorations up before the first Sunday in Advent. But this year I spent a good chunk of February and June with Christmas on the brain–I was writing Christmas novellas!

My February project will be a Carina release in 2014. Since that’s so far away, and it doesn’t have a release date or title yet, all I’ll say about it for now is that it’s the story of star-crossed lovers reunited after a five-year separation at a Regency house party…with wassailing and mistletoe and a thick coat of snow on the ground.

But my June project, Christmas Past, releases in less than two weeks, on November 25!

Christmas Past cover

As the title hints, it’s a time travel story. The heroine is from my own adopted hometown of Seattle in 2013–only in her version of the present, time travel has been invented and is largely used for medical and other scientific research. Sydney is a PhD student in historical epidemiology, making her first trip to the past to collect blood samples from soldiers in Wellington’s army for her mentor’s study on the epidemiological impacts of the Napoleonic Wars.

Time-traveling PhD student Sydney Dahlquist’s first mission sounded simple enough—spend two weeks in December 1810 collecting blood samples from the sick and wounded of Wellington’s army, then go home to modern-day Seattle and Christmas with her family. But when her time machine breaks, stranding her in the past, she must decide whether to sacrifice herself to protect the timeline or to build a new life—and embrace a new love—two centuries before her time.

Rifle captain Miles Griffin has been fascinated by the tall, beautiful “Mrs. Sydney” from the day he met her caring for wounded soldiers. When he stumbles upon her time travel secret on Christmas Eve, he vows to do whatever it takes to seduce her into making her home in his present—by his side.

I had a lot of fun writing this story, particularly going back and forth between Sydney’s contemporary voice and Miles’s Regency voice–and I’m so used to shifting into Regency vocabulary and diction the instant I open a manuscript file that Sydney’s was far more challenging to achieve!

When writing my Christmas novellas, I found myself imagining reader busy with everything that makes November and December such a joyous yet challenging time of year. Maybe she’s flying home to her family and wants a good story to take her mind off a crowded, turbulent flight. Maybe she just put her pies in the oven and wants to put her feet up and read while her house warms with the aromas of pumpkin and spice. Maybe she’s snowed in, unable to make it to work or school, and is elated to finally have time to escape into fiction.

What about you? When do you read holiday novellas? What are some of your favorites? And when do you put up and take down your decorations?

Christmas Past is now available for preorder from multiple sources, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Kobo, and Google Play.