Risky Regencies

Stealing the Classics: Cyrano de Bergerac

Updated on August 25, 2015 by Janet Mullany

Welcome Miranda Neville to the Riskies! She’s giving away two copies of her novella P.S. I Love You. See below on how to enter.

Borrowing from history, myth, fairy tale, or other authors’ works is a time-honored tradition. The Greeks and Romans did it. Shakespeare did. And I have done it.

Cyrano de Bergerac was a seventeenth century French soldier and writer. Judging by the portrait shown here he did, indeed, have a big nose. He is best known through the 1897 drama by Edmond Rostand. The love story in the play is invented, though based on real people.

In case you need reminding, Cyrano loves Roxane but believes he his so ugly she can never love him. She confides that she loves Christian. Christian, his handsome BFF, is bit of a boob and quite inarticulate. Expected to woo his lady by letters, he had Cyrano write them for him. Roxane falls in love with the letters and marries Christian, though she has found his conversation a little disappointing in the flesh. When the latter is killed in battle Cyrano doesn’t tell the truth but preserves the memory of his friend in Roxane’s heart. Only on his deathbed does her reveal that he was the author of the letters and thus the man she loves.

The play has been translated, revived, and filmed numerous times. Roxanne (with Steve Martin and Daryl Hannah) and The Truth About Cats and Dogs are movies based on the plot. According to Wikipedia the story has been adapted as an Indian musical, a porn movie, and numerous other iterations.

I therefore make no apology for appropriating Cyrano for my novella P.S. I Love You, part of a quartet of connected stories in At the Duke’s Wedding with Caroline Linden, Maya Rodale, and Katharine Ashe.

The thing that always annoyed me about the original story is that Cyrano and Christian are so bound up in their bromance it never occurs to them that Roxane deserves to know the truth and make up her own mind which man she prefers. (Mind you, Rostand’s heroine is a bit drippy. Sign of the times, perhaps.)

In my Regency version the protagonist is the badly scarred Christian, Earl of Bruton (Cyrano not being a likely name for an English aristocrat), Christian became Frank (secondary character name), and Roxane was Anglicized to Rosanne.

Handsome, dumb Frank fell for Rosanne at a hunting party and received permission from her father to write to her. Panic-stricken, he has his cynical cousin Christian dictate the letters. Rosanne and Christian fall in love through correspondence and they all meet at a ducal house party where complications ensue. Where I depart from the original is the way Rosanne, smart girl, figures out the deception and takes control.

What are your favorite romances that steal from the classics? Do you know of another romance version of Cyrano de Bergerac? I feel sure mine was not the first.

You may read an excerpt from P.S. I Love You here. The novella is currently 99ç at Amazon, Nook, iBooks and Kobo. The full anthology At the Duke’s Wedding (which I highly recommend: the other stories are great) is at the same retailers. (Amazon, Nook, iBooks and Kobo)

Miranda Neville is the author of nine Regency historical romances and several novellas. Her next book is Christmas in Duke Street with Grace Burrowes, Carolyn Jewel, and Shana Galen, coming in October. Website • Facebook • Twitter
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Posted in Giveaways, Guest, Regency | Tagged At the Duke's Wedding, Contest, Miranda Neville, novella, PS I Love You | 4 Replies

Plot bunnies free to a good home: Jewish Regency edition

Updated on August 22, 2015 by Rose Lerner

As you may have noticed, I love sharing plot bunnies, or ideas for novels I get while researching. These are books I really really want to read but am not going to write.

This month, I’ve come up with a Jewish-themed list of awesome Regency romance scenarios, since the dearth of Jewish historical romance became pretty obvious when people started asking for recommendations after the whole For Such a Time imbroglio. (To find the books that do exist, try this Goodreads list and the #jhrom hashtag on Twitter.)

You may notice that very few of my bunnies involve the Upper Ten Thousand. There were a number of Jews socializing with dukes during the Regency (you can read a bit about that in this blog post I did at AAR), but that just isn’t my personal jam.

1. There was at least one Jewish (or part-Jewish) bodysnatching gang in London during the Regency, led by Israel Chapman. I really wanted to learn more about this since my own hero from True Pretenses, Asher Cohen, was part of a Jewish bodysnatching gang as a child. (His fictional boss’s name, Izzy Jacobs, is an homage to Chapman.) Googling turned up…an article titled “Israel Chapman: Australia’s first police detective.”

Australia…I said to myself. If you were convicted of bodysnatching, you might end up transported to Australia. What if it’s the same guy?

And it is!!! Continue Reading

Posted in Plot bunnies, Risky Regencies | 16 Replies

Susanna’s European Trip in Pictures, Part I – London, Brussels, and Waterloo

Updated on August 20, 2015 by susanna

A little over two months ago now, my husband, my daughter and I boarded this plane–a LONG direct flight from SeaTac to Heathrow–for the beginning of our European adventure. I thought that over my next few blog posts, I’d share some pictures and stories from our journey, focusing on those of most interest to Regency readers.

If your vacation is going to focus on history, what better place to start than a TARDIS? (When we asked Miss Fraser what she wanted to see in London, her immediate response was “the TARDIS.” Mr. Fraser was able to track down a blue police box still standing, doubtless just for the sake of photo ops like this one of my two nearest and dearest.)

TARDIS

While in London we also stopped by Trafalgar Square, where we saw Nelson atop his column, and Hyde Park Corner, home of a handsome equestrian statue of my beloved Duke of Wellington.

Trafalgar

Wellington

Along the way we visited St Paul’s, where I spent some time in the crypt to pay my respects to Nelson and Wellington at their tombs, but as photography is forbidden in the cathedral, I have no pictures to show for it. Sadly, the same is true of Apsley House, the Great Duke’s impressive London home (my bored daughter’s understatement: “this IS a really fancy house”)…foiling my plans to take a selfie with the outsized and grandiose nude statue of Napoleon contained therein.

I do highly recommend Apsley House for any Regency fan visiting London, incidentally. It’s not one of the Major Big Deal Sights–which means it’s less crowded and you have more time to linger over all the portraits (many of which will look SO familiar to you if you’ve read nonfiction of the era at all), the furnishings, and the general sumptuousness of it all.

But after only a few days in London it was time for Brussels and the Waterloo reenactment. Our entire family loved Brussels. Compared to London and Paris, it has a parochial, small-city feel (despite the whole EU capital thing), and since we didn’t have tremendous expectations for it, almost everything was a pleasant surprise. It’s beautiful, in an echoes-of-antique-grandeur sort of way:

Brussels

And Belgian chocolate? Even better than you’re imagining. AMAZING. When people ask Miss Fraser what was her favorite place in Europe, she always says, “Belgium, because of the chocolate,” and I can’t really argue that point. (That our Brussels hotel had excellent and reliable wifi doubtless raised it in her estimation too.) I also fell in love with the frites, especially the ones in this little storefront place across the square from our hotel with the tourist-trappy name “Belgian Frites.” I wouldn’t have tried it if I hadn’t noticed the long lines of local teenagers my second day there–after which I had frites with mayo as lunch or an afternoon snack four days in a row.

The Waterloo reenactment, however, didn’t quite live up to all my expectations. It might’ve been better if we’d been part of an organized tour with a guide to show us around. As is, it was a bit chaotic and challenging to navigate and understand what was going on.

The actual anniversary of the battle fell on a Thursday, but the organizers held the reenactment on Friday and Saturday evenings. I wanted to have the experience of standing on that ground two hundred years to the day after the battle, so on the 18th we schlepped out to the battlefield by train, bus, and long walk, and visited the Allied reenactor camp.

Reenactors

Marching

Rifles

We didn’t get the opportunity to actually hang out with reenactors, somewhat to my disappointment–the handful of times I’ve visited reenactments in the past I’ve gotten to heft the muskets and chat with the people who carry them. Maybe it was just because the Waterloo anniversary was SUCH a big deal, but there wasn’t the same kind of approachability there.

As for the reenactment itself, it was a bit of a challenge to follow the action, even for someone like me who pretty much knows the course of the battle backwards and forwards. That said, it did give a good sense of how very smoky and confusing Napoleonic-era battlefields were:

Waterloo1

Waterloo2

And this was just 5000 reenactors out there for three hours or so. When you imagine what it must’ve been like 200 years before, when between the three armies involved there were almost 200,000 men engaged…whoa.

Even though the reenactment wasn’t everything I’d dreamed it would be, I’m glad I went. When I read or write about Waterloo from now on, I’ll have that much clearer a picture in my mind’s eye for having walked some of the ground and seen all those impeccably costumed reenactors. And, let’s face it, if it weren’t for Waterloo, the odds are I never would’ve gone to Belgium, and I would’ve missed out on that chocolate and those frites…

What about you? Have you traveled anywhere exciting this summer? And do you have travel tales of places that either exceeded or failed to live up to your expectations?

Next time I’ll post about our week in Paris (which exactly met our expectations–it really is that amazing). Expect lots of Napoleon…

Posted in Risky Regencies | Tagged Brussels, London, Napoleon, Susanna Fraser, travel, Waterloo, Wellington | 5 Replies

What a Character!

Updated on August 17, 2015 by Mary Blayney

As I begin the series that has been the subject of the occasional post here on Risky Regencies, I’ve been thinking about my hero and heroine, John and Mimi, and what makes them the unique and intriguing people they are. I’ve got it now but I won’t spoil the fun by talking about it when you can read about them before too long.

In the process of working it out I gave some thought to my past characters and what they have in common.

Anyone who knows me can guess that the key element they all share is “honor at the core of their being.” Though I could argue that Mia in COURTESAN’S KISS was right on the edge of honorable. She was just a bit too manipulative and selfish. Hopefully her loving relationship with her half-sister and her difficult youth made her behavior understandable and acceptable. And, in the end, of course, love conquers all.

At the other extreme of honor at the core has to be Michael Garret, the continuing character (not the hero) in the series I am writing now and the hero of LOVER’S KISS. Michael abandoned his religious training and joined the army rather than accept a living that would have made him a puppet. Even as a spy (see TRAITOR’S KISS) he knew the cost of his work and helped his colleagues whenever the need arose, even when it threatened his own safety. He is settled now, responding fully to his call as a vicar (though an unconventional one) and finds great joy in the world around him. (And yes, Michael looks a lot like Liam Neeson.)

But there is one other element that my characters share and it’s what makes them unique in their world. Almost all of them defy the social norm in some way. Michael as an unconventional vicar. Mia, in her extreme, way insisting that she would become a courtesan.

Then there is Lady Olivia, the daughter of a duke, who loves the kitchen, especially baking. Her brother, Lord David, decides to go into business despite the fact that gentlemen did not. The list goes on and includes either the hero or heroine and sometimes both in my “Kiss series” (Check out my website for titles and details: MaryBlayney.com)

So now what I am wondering is what element your favorite characters share whether you be reader or writer? I bet I know what Diane Gaston will say.

Posted in Regency, Writing | 5 Replies

Romance, Feminism, and Academia

Updated on August 13, 2015 by Elena Greene

I’ve been thinking a lot about Gail’s post last week “About Those Dukes”, and also about this this article in the Smithsonian Magazine, “Why Can’t Romance Novels Get Any Love?”

The article talks about Germaine Greer’s “feminist call to arms”, The Female Eunuch (1970) in which:

“Greer was skewering the authors of romance novels, and the readers who made them bestsellers, suggesting they were submitting to nothing short of serfdom to their heaving, rippling fictional heroes: alpha males with giant pectorals, important lives, patriarchal views and very little interest in love…until just the right petite, witty heroine comes along.”

I love the idea that literary scholars like Sarah Frantz Lyons, who started the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance, want romance to get the same attention from scholars as other popular genres such as mystery and science fiction.

“We’ve been talking about this for 30 years: since the 1980s at least, it’s been about empowerment versus oppression. Is this narrative empowering or oppressive to women?” she says. “We need new approaches to romance fiction.”

It’s the sort of thing Jennifer Crusie has been saying, probably even before this 1998 article “Defeating the Critics: What We Can Do About the Anti-Romance Bias”.

“But romance fiction insists that women be front and center, demonstrating over and over again that women can solve their own problems. Reading that kind of narrative empowers women and therefore attacks the basic assumption of patriarchy.”

I love this statement, and this is part of why I write romance. (I hope Crusie’s smart and sexy books are among those that will be studied.)

I’ve also read romance novels that tapped into fantasies that may or may not work with the idea of women solving their own problems.

I suspect part of the appeal of Duke and billionaire stories is the fantasy of never having to work a boring job or worry about money again. For personal reasons, it’s not a fantasy that appeals to me, but I can understand it. When I’ve been too busy taking care of others to care for myself, I daydream about tropical vacations where all I have to do is snorkel with pretty fish, get massages, and sip umbrella drinks. But I don’t really need a life of luxury. I need to rearrange my life so there’s more time for self-care on a regular basis. I’m working on that, but the vacation fantasies help me get through bad days. Likewise, a woman whose job is unpleasant or unrewarding, or who is struggling to make ends meet, has every right to enjoy an escapist story, even though she may also be actively trying to improve her situation.

I feel the same way about domineering, alpha heroes and “forced seduction” stories. Personally, I find some heroes cross the line from “alpha” to “abuser” and especially if I don’t see a real transformation, the story isn’t going to work for me. It is very, very important to me to see that at least by the end, the hero treats the heroine as a real person and an equal, neither domineering nor putting her on a pedestal. But each reader has the right to decide for herself which stories work for her. Perhaps some women can’t distinguish between the fantasy of being conquered and how healthy relationships work, but that’s no reason that others should not enjoy those books.

I do not care for censorship. What I do believe in is dialogue. Dialogue is good. Criticism is good. I’m thinking about all the conversation about Fifty Shades of Grey. I didn’t participate because I haven’t read it, but from the articles and blogs I skimmed, I could see there were intelligent points made. I believe we should all discuss, criticize, even argue about the books if we want, but judging people personally for their reading choices is just an exercise in ego.

Which gets me back to the academic study of the romance genre. Scholars will likely find many stories featuring strong heroines and the development of healthy relationships.

They’ll also likely read some of those old contemporaries I used to find around the house as a child, where the nurse always marries the doctor and the secretary gets the boss. (And in those old stories there were never any female doctors or bosses.)

Scholars may also include books like the one in this review on the Smart Bitches/Trashy Books site: Purity’s Passion. A quote, just to give you an idea:

We’re at the midpoint of the book, and let us tot it up: Purity has had consensual sex twice, been raped by six men (two of them multiple times), and nearly raped by a seventh.

So I don’t think a broad study of the romance will lift the genre as a whole to respectability. That’s not important to me. Although some romance novels are complex and beautifully written, not everything needs to be literary. Although I prefer to read and strive to write romances that end in what I think are healthy relationships, I do not deny others the right to read and write what speaks to them.

What I do hope is that the study results in some good discussion. Maybe some of those who haven’t yet tried a romance will do so, at least out of curiosity.

What do you think? Which romance authors or books do you think are most feminist, or most literary? Any favorite guilty pleasures you’d like to share?

Elena

Posted in Rant, Reading | Tagged academia, feminism, Romance genre | 2 Replies