And, for your Sunday edification, one more update from the Risky Regencies! Signet author Rhonda Woodward reports she is working on both a Regency historical and “a contemporary romance set in my home state of Arizona.”
Stay tuned for more! And be sure to let us know if there is any author yo’d like to hear about…
A couple of weeks ago, I posted about my Father’s Day gift dilemma. I solved that impossible-to-buy-for problem by going to Best Buy and getting the DVDs of the first four seasons of Northern Exposure. Now, I confess this was a gift for me as much as for my dad. I adore this show, and have been having enormous fun re-watching favorite episodes. I’ve always thought that if Cicely, Alaska was a real place I would SO move there. A little town off in its own isolated world, far from the traffic snarls and Super Wal Marts. Where the rugged-individualist inhabitants you might suspect to be rednecks are actually quirky intellectuals, prone to waxing philosophical about poetry, astronomy, string theory. Where there are all kinds of funky festivals and a wide variety of kooks, including Ed, who kind of reminds me of my high school boyfriend, though HE was a jazz musician and not an amateur film director/shaman. There was still the leather jacket and that weird, vague affability. I would like to run a funky little bookstore, eat breakfast at the Brick, talk over Kant and Nietzche with Chris In The Morning. Sure, I really hate the cold, but it never seems to really get chilly there, except to Joel in his absurdly large parka…
My point, sort of, is this–eccentrics. I talked about them a bit on my own blog yesterday. People who are unusual, erratic, unpredictable, who march to the beat of their own drummer and all that. We sometimes encounter them in Regency romances. You know–the Old Broad, who wears giant purple turbans and says crazy things in the middle of Almacks. The bluestocking heroine who doesn’t want to marry because it would interfere with being an historian/a sculptor/raising Shar-Pei puppies. Or the heroine’s father who neglects his family to perform experiments with ball lightening in the garden, leaving the heroine to take care of all her brothers and sisters by herself. I love those characters.
I decided to do this post on Famous Eccentrics of the Regency. But then I realized that it might be easier to do a list of the Few Non-Eccentrics! There are just too many colorful characters in this period. I’m sure there must have been something in that watery Almacks lemonade we’re always reading about. Just a few:
–Prinny, of course. And wife number two, Princess Caroline. And almost all his friends. And several of his brothers. And most of his sisters. Oh, and his mistresses, too.
–Architect Sir John Soane. Anyone who has been to his museum can see right away this was a class-A hoarder. At least he hoarded some good stuff, like Hogarths and Roman bronzes from Pompeii. Unlike my own crazy aunt, who just hoardes cats, plastic grocery sacks, and old bottles of nail polish, but who inexplicably gave away most of her great designer clothes from the 1950s and ’60s. Ahhhh, relatives. But that’s another post. 🙂
–Caro Lamb. There was probably no one like her for causing amusing and scandalous public scenes at parties. Stalking and tantrums and bonfires, oh my!
–Oh, and that leads to Byron, of course. And Shelley. Crackpots for the ages.
–Sir John Lade, who was for a time in charge of Prinny’s riding stables. He liked to dress and talk like a groom, and was married to a woman named “Letty,” who started out as a servant in a brothel. Later she became mistress to a highwayman known as “16 String Jack,” until he landed at the gallows. Then the Duke of York. Not much of a judge of women, that one.
–Beau Brummel. The original metrosexual and scourge of improperly starched cravats.
–And one of my favorites, WJC Scott-Bentinck, Duke of Portland. He lived from 1800-79, so just barely fits in “our” period, but for sheer mental loopiness he just can’t be beat. I first read about him Bill Bryson’s hilarious Notes From a Small Island (Bryson, another fun eccentric I’m sure, has several other equally riotous books. If you haven’t read him, get to the bookstore right now and buy A Walk in the Woods or Neither Here Nor There! Go, go!!!). WJC took his ancestral pile, Welbeck Abbey, and built a 15-mile series of tunnels and passageways underneath, mainly so he could avoid all human contact. As Bryson puts it, “When the Duke died, his heirs found all of the aboveground rooms devoid of furnishings except for one chamber in the middle of which sat the Duke’s commode. The main hall was mysteriously floorless. Most of the rooms were painted pink. The one upstairs room in which the Duke resided was packed to the ceiling with hundreds of green boxes, each of which contained a single dark brown wig. This was, in short, a man worth getting to know.” (pg. 167)
And that’s just the tip of the nutty iceberg…
So, I say hurrah for eccentrics! They make our dullish world a little more colorful, interesting, and fun. Who are some of your favorite crazies in books and in life?
I’ve just returned from a trip to the Midwest–Minnesota, to be exact–and am grumpy, fairly wrinkled, and just a bit stinky. Not to mention weary. To the bone.
In other words, if I were looking for Prince Charming–or in Regency terms, the Duke of Charming–I would probably yell at him because he hadn’t brought me my coffee just the way I like.
Yet so many Regency heroes and heroines take off on a vast journey and manage to fall in love. Without an airplane! Or a Northwest snack box (only $3!). How do they do it? I love road romances, even though I would make an awful heroine in one; in fact, on the plane I was sneaking pages of Georgette Heyer‘s Sylvester, which takes the hero and heroine to France and back again (I’m assuming they come back, I haven’t finished it yet).
Some of my favorite Regencies are, in fact, road romances (click here for the link to AAR’s Special Title Listings of Cabin and Road Romances). Here is a partial listing of some of the ones I’ve loved.
Tallie’s Knight (2001) by Anne Gracie
Sprig Muslin (1956) by Georgette Heyer
Sylvester: or The Wicked Uncle (1957) by Georgette Heyer
Miss Billings Treads the Boards (1993) by Carla Kelly
Miss Chartley’s Guided Tour (1989) by Carla Kelly
Miss Whittier Makes a List (1994) by Carla Kelly
Summer Campaign (1989) by Carla Kelly
The Wedding Journey (2002) by Carla Kelly
With This Ring (1997) by Carla Kelly
Carla Kelly seems to love taking her characters on the road–and really, how better to make two people who in a normal situation would never come in contact with each other fall in love? Throw in an adventure, usually involving a child or a lost or stolen inheritance, and all bets are off. But the romance is on!
Could you see yourself spending eight hours in a jostling carriage traveling over country roads with your loved one and a precocious child? Or your loved one and an irascible old lady and her pug? How about if you were abducted by said loved one in pursuit of some lost or stolen treasure?
Do you like road romances? Which are your favorites?
Megan
www.meganframpton.com
doesn’t mean it’s Regency.
Today I’m going to take a look at a few of my unfavorite myths about England and the Regency and rant about them.
First, the Downton phenomenon, otherwise known as when will it be safe to watch PBS again? The Downton phenomenon, formerly known as the OscarWildeization phenomenon can be further subdivided into:
THIS is a gel
The Gel thing aka the Maggie Smith Making a Quick Buck thing. Why do dowagers refer to young women as gels? Most of them seem fairly solid to me. Why in fact does this upper class accent predominate in the Regency? We don’t know how they spoke. We do know that the Countess of Devonshire and her crowd affected a particular drawl. But the rest of them? One accent in society, another at home (particularly men who had to speak to the ragged oppressed on their estates)? See below, Beautiful Accents.
Which leads me to the Loveable Servant with vaguely cockney accent whatever their origins. I will stop right there. These are just two examples of this egregious blight.
The Postcard Phenomenon. This is the assumption that every part of England, particularly rural areas, are beautiful. Not so. Neither are thatched roofs generic.
The Wrong Food and Drink. Scones, afternoon tea referred to as high tea, muffins (unless sold by a muffin man; they are things like big flat crumpets), whisky outside of Scotland, bacon and eggs etc. for breakfast. And in other periods, potatoes were unknown in the medieval period; seventeenth century cottage dwellers did not cook apple crisp over their open fires. (Yes, I have seen these.) And if you were a vegetarian it was from necessity (and you’d kill for a bit of bacon to add to the pottage; some things just don’t change) or you’d be dying.
Moving on to topics also relevant to contemporaries:
English soccer fan
Excessive politeness and grace. I think I do not need to explain further.
Beautiful accents. Some of them. Some are unintelligible. But Fuck You sounds so much more genteel in a posh accent.
The Royal family and people with titles are universally adored, loved, and respected. Not so and certainly not all 
the time, unless there’s a need for a Big Celebration or a Big Cry. Much of the time they are regarded as overpaid embarrassments. During the worst of the Charles-Di breakup honest satirists and comedians were put out of work as the Royals surpassed themselves.
But back to the Regency. Would you care to share your favorite myths?
In my occasional–very occasional series of great commuter reads, here’s a book that I don’t think is in print in the States, but is well worth going on to Amazon.co.uk to find. It’s by Philippa Gregory (who wrote The Other Boleyn Girl).
A Respectable Trade is about the lives of people caught up in the slave trade. It’s set in Bristol, one of the English cities whose wealth was built on the trade before business moved to Liverpool. The heroine, Frances, marries merchant Josiah Cole, who decides it’s time to move up in the world now he has a wife with social skills and connections–and also, because in his way, he cares about her and wants her to equal any other fine Bristol lady. And one of his plans to get rich is to import and train slaves for the English market. Frances realizes she can’t pretend to herself how her husband’s money is made, and can’t deny the slaves their humanity. It’s a book that is as harrowing and painful, and as full of ambiguities, as the period in history itself.
What Philippa Gregory does with her characters is astonishing. Even Josiah, the slave trader, is someone you can’t stop yourself feeling sorry for as you see him plunge toward total financial disaster, betrayed by the elite traders of Bristol from whom he so desperately craves acceptance. And Frances’ growing conscience and her awareness that her slaves are more than commodities or savages are wonderfully done.
It is, too, an amazing love story, although not a romance. One of the slaves Frances sets to train is Mehuru, formerly a priest in the African kingdom of Yaruba. Frances has just asked him how, in his country, a man would tell the woman he loved that she was beautiful:
“A man would tell her that he wanted her as his wife,” Mehuru said simply. “He would not tell her that she looked as well as another woman. What would that mean? He would not tell her that she was enjoyable–like a statue or a picture. He would tell her that he longed to lie with her. He would tell her that he would have no peace until she was in his arms, until she was beneath him, beside him, on top of him, until her mouth was his lake for drinking, and her body was his garden. Desire is not about ‘beauty,’ as if a woman as a work of art. Desire is about having a woman, because she can be as plain as an earthenware pot and still make you sick with longing for her.”
An amazing, thoughtful, moving book. Get hold of it.