Risky Regencies

Fun With Pinterest!

Updated on September 16, 2013 by Amanda McCabe/Laurel McKee

As I know I’ve talked about here before, I love-love-love Pinterest! I have to be very careful whenever I get onto the site, because it can easily be hours later by the time I’ve finished following trails of pretty dresses, rooms furnished with many bookshelves, yummy cocktails, and funny “Hey Girl” memes. But the one most useful thing about it, I’ve found, is that it helps me keep all my book inspiration images in one easily accessed spot. Here are a few pins for my Murder at Hatfield House book (out in 2 weeks!):

Images of Hatfield House itself…

Musical instruments of the period (my heroine/sleuth, Kate Haywood, is a court musician to Elizabeth I!)

Elizabethan jewelry…

Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald (“the fair Geraldine,” a kinswoman to Elizabeth, who appears in one scene…)

The actress Lily Collins, who looks a bit like Kate in my mind!

Tudor humor (this one is Anne of Cleves, but hey, it’s funny, even if it’s not quite period-correct for my story!!)

So I am not always wasting time on Pinterest! Sometimes it is Very Important Research. Are you on Pinterest? What do you like about it?

(and I am extending my Hatfield House contest at my Amanda Carmack site for a few more days! Sign up for my newsletter for the chance to win an ARC of the book and an Elizabethan Queen Barbie!!)

Posted in Risky Regencies | 3 Replies

Pride and Prejudice – A Victorian Soap Opera???

Updated on September 15, 2013 by Diane Gaston

I’m continuing Myretta’s Jane Austen theme today.

The Christian Science Monitor just published an article on the 200th anniversary of Pride and Prejudice, coinciding with Bath’s annual Jane Austen Festival. The title of the article is “Victorian-era soap opera turns 200: Pride and Prejudice still resonates today.”

Doesn’t that raise your hackles?

My goodness! First to call the book Victorian-era?

One could argue whether the book was Regency, because it was published in 1813, during the Regency, or whether it was Georgian, since Austen first wrote it in 1797, but it is lightyears from being Victorian in time-period and story! One wonders whether the journalist (or title writer) ever thought to check his research on that matter? Ironically, attached to the article is a a quiz about the United Kingdom (more on that later). I suspect the writers would not score well.

Then to call Pride and Prejudice a soap opera? Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

The article compares the popularity of Downton Abbey to Pride and Prejudice. Now, I love Downton Abbey, but it is more a soap opera than Pride and Prejudice ever could be. Wikipedia defines a soap opera as: a serial drama, on television or radio, that features multiple related story lines dealing with the lives of multiple characters. The stories in these series typically focus heavily on emotional relationships to the point of melodrama.

Pride and Prejudice isn’t a series. True, the book has multiple characters with multiple story lines and is heavily focused on emotional relationships, but never never to the point of melodrama! Austen did not write melodrama. She wrote with a keen observation, wisdom, and wit about people, about their strengths and weaknesses, about how they could change and grow-through love.

What’s more, Pride and Prejudice is considered one of the greatest books in literature. It regularly appears on lists of the greatest books of all time (except on one list I read yesterday and couldn’t find today to provide a link. And this list of 100 Must Read Books for Men- only one woman author there, Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird). Consider this quote from Anna Quindlen:

Pride and Prejudice is also about that thing that all great novels consider, the search for self. And it is the first great novel to teach us that that search is as surely undertaken in the drawing room making small talk as in the pursuit of a great white whale or the public punishment of adultery. (from Wikipedia)

Other than that, the article is pretty decent with some good observations from people who have the expertise to speak knowledgeably about the book.

It also includes a fun quiz – How Well Do You Know Pride and Prejudice? I scored only 80% mostly because I didn’t know enough about the film adaptations of the book. And I guessed Lizzie’s age wrong.

The article also links to another quiz – Keep calm and answer on: Take our United Kingdom quiz. I scored 80% on this one, too, mostly because I know Regency history, but not much else!

Take the quizzes and tell us how you do!

Do you think Pride and Prejudice is a soap opera?

Posted in Frivolity, Jane Austen, Reading | Tagged Anna Quindlen, Christian Science Monitor, Jane Austen, Jane Austen Festival, Pride and Prejudice, quiz, United Kingdom | 13 Replies

Runaway Countess Winner!

Updated on September 15, 2013 by Amanda McCabe/Laurel McKee

I’m late for an important date! I finally got around to drawing a winner for a signed copy of The Runaway Countess! It’s…Barbara Elness! Congrats, and I hope you enjoy. Email me your address at amccabe7551 AT yahoo….

Posted in Risky Regencies | 1 Reply

Elinor or Marianne?

Updated on September 13, 2013 by Myretta

Marianne & Elinor

Well, who are you? I’m of the belief that we’re all one of Jane Austen’s characters and, heaven knows, there are enough online quizzes to bear this out. Only Sense & Sensibility, however, gives us two heroines from which to choose, and they couldn’t be more different. I think that we all have a little bit of either Elinor or Marianne in us (or possibly both). Literary criticism, in general, has signed the traits of sense and sensibility to Elinor and Marianne, respectively.

The cult of sensibility was a late 18th century social construct that was characterized by the exaggerated expression of emotion. So Marianne. The Marianne whom we first meet in Sense & Sensibility is all sensibility. After Willoughby leaves Allenham, Marianne indulges in every symptom of sentimentality associated with sensibility.

When breakfast was over, she walked out by herself, and wandered about the village of Allenham, indulging the recollection of past enjoyment and crying over the present reverse for the chief of the morning.

The evening passed off in the equal indulgence of feeling. She played over every favourite song that she had been used to play to Willoughby, every air in which their voices had been oftenest joined, and sat at the instrument gazing on every line of music that he had written out for her, till her heart was so heavy that no farther sadness could be gained; and this nourishment of grief was every day applied. She spent whole hours at the pianoforte alternately singing and crying; her voice often totally suspended by her tears. In books, too, as well as in music, she courted the misery which a contrast betwen the past and present was certain of giving. She read nothing but what they had been used to read together.

Such violence of affliction indeed could not be supported for ever; it sunk within a few days into a calmer melancholy; but these employments, to which she daily recurred, her solitary walks and silent meditations, still produced occasional effusions of sorrow as lively as ever.

Elinor, on the other hand, is all sense, the embodiment of early 18th century rationalism. It is Elinor who takes charge when the Dashwoods must leave Norland and gets them moved and settled at Barton Cottage while Marianne mourns the loss of “dear, dear Norland.” It is Elinor who worries about Marianne’s emotional attachment to Willoughby and who tries to talk sense into both Marianne and her mother. It is Elinor who confronts Willoughby when he calls during Marianne’s illness. And, although Elinor is also nursing a broken heart, she never wallows in melancholy, but gets on with what must be done.

The conversation that, perhaps, best exemplifies these two personalities occurs in Chapter 16:

“Dear, dear Norland,” said Elinor, “probably looks much as it always does at this time of year. The woods and walks thickly covered with dead leaves.”

“Oh!” cried Marianne, “with what transporting sensations have I formerly seen them fall! How have I delighted, as I walked, to see them driven in showers about me by the wind! What feelings have they, the season, the air altogether inspired! Now there is no one to regard them. They are seen only as a nuisance, swept hastily off, and driven as much as possible from the sight.”

“It is not every one,” said Elinor, “who has your passion for dead leaves.”

The wages of sensibility

So who are you? The sensible Elinor or the sensitive (and wet) Marianne?

Posted in Risky Regencies | 13 Replies

Fairs and Giveaway Winners!

Updated on September 13, 2013 by Elena Greene

A few weeks ago I went to the New York State Fair. It’s become something of a ritual for my family; there are things we must do every time we go.

We eat lunch and dinner at the International Building, each getting different things and sharing. Sushi, falafel, pierogies…yum.

We always visit the Poultry Barn, where my youngest and I play a game she started as a toddler. Can we buy a (chicken, duck, bunny, racing pigeon)? My answer is just “No.”

We catch a little of whatever is going on in the equestrian arena in the Toyota Coliseum. This year it was six hitch Belgians and later, Percherons driven “unicorn” fashion (two behind, one in front). Gorgeous beasts, all of them.

Besides those things, we wander the various exhibition halls and watch whatever performers happen to be on, check out the sand and butter sculptures, etc… We end the day watching the parade and eating funnel cake.

Fairs in England started out as agricultural events: opportunities to buy and sell livestock. Entertainment was also important, but by the late eighteenth century it was a major focus of the “Fringe Fairs” around London, which included Greenwich, where I had the hero of Fly with a Rogue do a balloon ascension.

Here are some descriptions of Greenwich Fair from Sketches from Boz, Chapter 12 by Charles Dickens, 1836. According to other sources, his descriptions were valid for the Regency. He describes the entertainment, which included itinerant theatres, Wild Beast Shows, exhibitions of dwarfs and the like, and dancing at the Crown & Anchor.

Imagine yourself in an extremely dense crowd, which swings you to and fro, and in and out, and every way but the right one; add to this the screams of women, the shouts of boys, the clanging of gongs, the firing of pistols, the ringing of bells, the bellowings of speaking-trumpets, the squeaking of penny dittos, the noise of a dozen bands, with three drums in each, all playing different tunes at the same time, the hallooing of showmen, and an occasional roar from the wild-beast shows; and you are in the very centre and heart of the fair.

And here’s a bit on the food:

The entrance is occupied on either side by the vendors of gingerbread and toys: the stalls are gaily lighted up, the most attractive goods profusely disposed, and unbonneted young ladies, in their zeal for the interest of their employers, seize you by the coat, and use all the blandishments of ‘Do, dear’—‘There’s a love’—‘Don’t be cross, now,’ &c., to induce you to purchase half a pound of the real spice nuts, of which the majority of the regular fair-goers carry a pound or two as a present supply, tied up in a cotton pocket-handkerchief. Occasionally you pass a deal table, on which are exposed pen’orths of pickled salmon (fennel included), in little white saucers: oysters, with shells as large as cheese-plates, and divers specimens of a species of snail (wilks, we think they are called), floating in a somewhat bilious-looking green liquid.

I remember the hero of Georgette Heyer’s Fridays’s Child taking the heroine to a fair, but off the top of my head, I can’t remember other fairs in Regency romance. It wasn’t an especially proper thing to do, and could get a bit rowdy. Not to say that people of the gentry or aristocracy couldn’t go, but they’d plan accordingly.

Do you enjoy county or state fairs? What’s your favorite thing to do (or eat) there?

But before we discuss, here are the winners of the paperback version of Fly with a Rogue: